Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that local transformation plans for children and young people’s mental health provide transparency on total spend in each area and not just spend of additional funding allocated by NHS England.

Information on total spend on mental health services for children and young people is published in NHS England’s five year forward view for mental health dashboard, available at the following link:

www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/taskforce/imp/mh-dashboard

This includes expenditure against additional funding which is not reported separately.

Clinical commissioning groups’ (CCGs) recurrent baseline allocations are uplifted annually, and this includes funding for mental health services for children and young people. NHS England tracks mental health expenditure by CCGs against the Mental Health Investment Standard, which requires an increase in spend on mental health by at least the amount of overall recurrent baseline allocations. Currently 85% of CCGs are meeting the Mental Health Investment Standard and recent NHS Planning Guidance for 2018/19 requires all CCGs to meet the standard.