Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to (a) improve mental health provision and (b) support the needs of children and young people.

We are making £1.4 billion available by 2020 to improve the provision of children and young people’s mental health services (CYP MH), including £150 million specifically to tackle eating disorders.

This funding is delivering a major system-wide transformation programme to improve access and make services more widely available across the country, and implementing the vision set out in Future in Mind. To this end all clinical commissioning groups working with their partners, developed CYP MH Transformation Plans in 2015/16, incorporating them last year into their wider National Health Service Sustainability and Transformation Plans. These set out how local agencies are working together to improve children and young people’s mental health across the full spectrum of need.

Later this year, the Government will publish a Green Paper on Children and Young People’s Mental Health focused on helping our youngest and most vulnerable members of society receive the best start in life. This will make sure best practice is being used consistently and will help to accelerate improvements across all services so that children and young people get the right mix of prevention and specialist support.