Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the waiting time for mental health assessment and therapy in (a) Lewisham borough, (b) London and (c) England.

The Government is committed to reducing waiting times for mental health therapies across England.

Performance against Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) waiting time standards continues to improve and we are consistently exceeding the targets. According to the 2016-17 IAPT annual report, 98.2% of those people completing treatment waited less than 18 weeks for their treatment to start in England against a target of 95% and 87.5% of people completing treatment waited less than six weeks against a target of 75%.

Updates on clinical commissioning group (CCG) performance against these targets, including for London and Lewisham, are published on the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health Dashboard at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/mental-health-five-year-forward-view-dashboard/

Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group has taken action in response to an increase in IAPT waiting times and expects to see an improvement in performance towards the end of Quarter 4 2017/18.