Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps (a) his Department and (b) NHS England are taking to reduce the practice of sending patients with severe mental problems to hospitals out of the patient's area.

Inappropriate out of area placements are unacceptable and the Government has committed to eliminate these in non-specialist, acute mental health care by 2020/21.

To support the delivery of this ambition, in October 2016 the Government put in place the first data collection to secure much-needed national transparency on this issue.

Clinical commissioning groups also have the opportunity to gain a financial Quality Premium if they successfully reduce their out of area bed days by 33% during 2017/18. This will also be available in 2018/19.