Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce waiting times for Child and Adult Mental Health Services for children with autism and ADHD in Battersea constituency.

It is the responsibility of integrated care boards (ICBs) to make available appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local populations, including in Battersea constituency area. We are supporting them to expand mental health services through the NHS Long Term Plan, which commits to increasing investment into mental health services by at least £2.3 billion a year by 2023/24. Part of this increased investment will enable an additional 345,000 children and young people aged zero to 25 years old to access National Health Service funded mental health support.

In recognition of the increased demand created by the COVID-19 pandemic, we invested an extra £79 million in 2021/22 to expand children’s mental health services, including enabling around 22,500 more children and young people to access community health services, 2,000 more to access eating disorder services and accelerating the coverage of mental health support teams in schools and colleges.

NHS England has consulted on the potential to introduce five new waiting time standards as part of its Clinically led Review of NHS Access Standards, including that children, young people and their families, presenting to community-based mental health services should start to receive care within four weeks from referral. As a first step, NHS England has recently shared and promoted guidance with its local system partners to consistently report waiting times to support the development of a baseline position. The Department is now working with NHS England on the next steps for introducing the new access and waiting time standards for mental health services.

In addition, NHS England is currently developing a national framework to support partners in local areas to commission and deliver autism assessment services for children, young people, and adults. The framework will be published in due course.

With respect to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), in a recent Westminster Hall debate, on 1 February 2023, I committed to look at how we can improve data on ADHD assessment waiting times, to help improve access to ADHD assessments in a timely way and in line with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guideline.