Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce waiting times for children with serious mental health problems.

The NHS Long Term Plan commits to investing £2.3 billion extra funding a year in expanding and transforming mental health services by March 2024. This will allow an extra 345,000 more children and young people including those with serious mental illness, to get the National Health Service-funded mental health support they need.

To support the mental health commitments in the NHS Long Term Plan, our aim is to grow the mental health workforce by an additional 27,000 staff by March 2024.

NHS England has consulted on the potential to introduce five new waiting time standards as part of its clinically-led review of NHS Access Standards, including that children, young people and their families, presenting to community-based mental health services should start to receive care within four weeks from referral. As a first step, NHS England has shared and promoted guidance with its local system partners to consistently report waiting times to support the development of a baseline position. NHS England are working on the next steps.