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 adequacy of the capacity of the mental health workforce.

The Government recognises the need to increase the mental health workforce to deliver its ambitious mental health transformation programme. To ensure that the National Health Service has an adequate workforce, Health Education England (HEE) published ‘Stepping Forward to 2020/21: The Mental Health Workforce Plan for England’. This plan sets out the Government’s ambition to deliver 21,000 new posts, professional and allied, across the mental health system, with the expectation that 19,000 of these places will be filled by staff employed directly by the NHS.

The plan aims to increase the size of the mental health workforce through increased recruitment, improved retention and through development of new roles and ways of working to improve efficient use of the most qualified staff. A Mental Health Workforce Delivery Group, chaired by HEE and attended by the Department and its arm's-length bodies, was established shortly after publication to oversee implementation of the plan, through regional sustainability and transformation partnerships.