Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the Fourth Report of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee of Session 2022-23 on Rural Mental Health, HC248, published on 9 May 2023, what progress his Department has made on implementing the recommendations in the section entitled Rural mental health service provision, policy and strategy development.

We remain committed to supporting thriving rural communities, as set out in our report Unleashing Rural Opportunity, published in June 2023.

Since the launch of the EFRA Committee’s inquiry in 2021, considerable progress has been made to help ensure access to mental health services in rural areas. The Government published its Response to the EFRA Committee Report on Rural Mental Health in October 2023.

The response recognised that people living and working in rural areas may face specific challenges in accessing the mental health services that they need and set out the various actions being taken forward to address mental health needs.

Key actions include:

• Publication of the Suicide prevention strategy for England: 2023 to 2028 in September 2023, which set out ambitions over the next five years to reduce suicide rates, improve support for people who have self-harmed, and improve support for people bereaved by suicide. The strategy also identifies actions to tackle known risk factors, several of which are relevant for agricultural and veterinary workers, including financial difficulty and economic adversity, and social isolation and loneliness, while also embedding multiple actions to tackle emerging means of suicide.

• The launch of the Department for Health and Social Care’s £10 million Suicide Prevention Grant Fund in August 2023. This was to support the suicide prevention voluntary, charity and social enterprise sector to deliver activity that helps meet the increased demand for support, and to embed preventive activity that can help to prevent suicides and stem the flow into crisis services. A list of organisations that have been awarded funding will be published soon.

• As committed to in the NHS Long Term Plan, published in 2019, we are continuing work to improve and widen access to care for children and adults needing mental health support. Over the 12 months to December 2023, 750,000 children and young people aged under 18 were supported through NHS-funded mental health services (with at least one contact) - a 31% increase since March 2021.

• Additionally, we are ahead of schedule on rolling out Mental Health Support Teams in schools and colleges. We achieved our original ambition of covering 25% of pupils in England a year earlier than planned and we expect this to increase to 4.2 million pupils, or 44% of the pupil population, by March 2024. We have plans to go further, extending coverage to at least 50% of pupils by the end of March 2025.

To help improve the service and support on offer to farmers we will make up to £500,000 available to deliver projects that support mental health in the farming sector. This will build on the support already on offer through the Farming Resilience Fund, which has benefitted over 19,000 farmers to date.