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 help reduce the number of young people with mental health issues.

To improve and transform support available to those children and young people with mental health issues, we are making an additional £1.4 billion available from 2015/16 to 2019/20. This additional money funds clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and various national programmes, including improving crisis support, expanding the workforce and tackling stigma. The additional money will also be used to improve access to services, and latest data shows that we our exceeding our trajectory for an additional 70,000 children and young people to access mental health treatment by 2020/21. Regarding funding, we have seen a 20% increase in CCG spend on children and young people’s mental health, rising from £516 million in 2015/16 to £619 million in 2016/17.

To improve public attitudes towards mental health and encourage help-seeking, we are investing over £12 million to support the national Time To Change programme over the course of 2016/17-2020/21. We are also working with Public Health England to develop a new £15 million programme to train at least 1 million people in basic mental health ‘first aid’ skills.

Our joint Department of Health and Social Care and Department for Education Green Paper, ‘Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision’, will be supported by over £300 million and aims to improve provision of services in schools, bolster links between schools and the National Health Service, and pilot a four week waiting time. We recently published our response to the consultation, which sets out what we heard during the consultation and provides next steps around implementation.