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 representation of people with lived experience among respondents to the call for evidence for the Mental Health Strategy.

The views of people who have firsthand experience of mental ill-health and mental health services must be at the heart of our work.

The Call for Evidence to inform the strategy closed on 10 July. It invited practical examples and evidence on how to implement improvements to mental health care and outcomes. We expect responses to be largely from service providers, clinicians, academics, and advocacy groups, but everyone was welcomed to submit evidence to the call for evidence. The responses are currently being analysed.

Alongside the Call for Evidence responses, we are conducting additional engagement with people with lived experience. This includes a series of focus group discussions with children, young people, and adults which are being run in partnership with key voluntary sector partners to test the scope and aims of the strategy.

We are exploring options to conduct further engagement sessions on key policy topics with people with lived experience. Examples of topics we might conduct bespoke engagement on include the integration of neurodevelopmental conditions within the strategy, which we know is a really important issue to get right.

The strategy is also being shaped by the insights that people with lived experience have shared with us already through the extensive 10-Year Health Plan engagement exercises and, more recently, lived experience input into the independent review into the prevalence and support for mental health, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism, the modern service frameworks, and the new Mental Health Act.