Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for his polices of reports from the British Medical Association that self-harm among teenage girls has increased by 68 per cent in the last three years.

The Department is aware of research showing increases in attendances at hospital and in primary care for self-harm amongst young women and continues to review a wide range of research to inform evidence-based policy development on mental health.

In 2017, the Department expanded the scope of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy to include addressing self-harm as an issue in its own right. The Department also continues to fund the Multi-Centre Study of Self-Harm which analyses data on people presenting at hospital for self-harm and identifies long-term trends.

The Government is investing at record levels to transform mental health services which includes making available £1.4 billion to improve access to children and young people’s mental health services. We are investing up to an additional £300 million to deliver the proposals set out in the joint health and education Green Paper ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’.

In addition, the Government is investing £247 million to roll-out liaison mental health teams in accident and emergency departments by 2020 to ensure that people who present at hospital with mental health problems get the appropriate care and treatment they need. Liaison mental health teams are well placed to deal with presentations for self-harm and to ensure that people receive a psychosocial assessment of their mental health needs to prevent further self-harming.