Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department is taking steps to help support children whose mental health is affected by their financial circumstances.

We are increasing investment into mental health services by at least £2.3 billion a year by March 2024 and have set out our aim in the NHS Long Term Plan for an additional 345,000 children and young people, including those from low income families, to be able to get the mental health support they need.

We are making good progress in rolling out mental health support teams to schools and colleges across England. As of spring 2022 there were 287 in place in over 4,700 schools and colleges across the country, offering support to children experiencing anxiety, depression, and other common mental health issues. We expect this is now at around 399 teams covering 35% of pupils. Over 500 are planned to be up and running by 2024.

On top of this we provided an extra £500 million in 2021/22 to accelerate our NHS mental health expansion plans and target groups whose mental health has been most affected by the pandemic. This included £79 million to expand support in children and young people’s mental health services; and a £15 million Prevention and Promotion for Better Mental Health Fund to help level up mental health and wellbeing across the country by investing in activity to promote positive mental health in the 40 most deprived local authority areas in England.

More widely, we are working across government and with external partners to identify who is most vulnerable to the impacts of increased cost of living, and what action can be taken to support them. The Government announced a £37 billion package of cost of living support to help households and businesses, including a £15 billion targeted package of direct support for the most vulnerable households.