Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how his Department measures and demonstrates parity of esteem between mental and physical health in the NHS.

The Government accepted the Mental Health Taskforce recommendation to identify the gaps in provision between mental health and physical health and has increased funding for mental health to an estimated £11.7 billion last year and have introduced waiting time standards so people know they will be treated quickly.

This Government continues to hold NHS England to account through the NHS Mandate for the achievement of measurable progress towards the parity of esteem for mental health and clinical commissioning groups are required through the annual planning guidance to increase spending each year on mental health at least in line with the increase in their overall allocation.

In line with practice in physical health, from 1 April 2015, waiting times standards for mental health came into effect for:

- treatment within two weeks for more than 50% of people experiencing a first episode of psychosis; and

- treatment within six weeks for 75% of people referred to the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, with 95% of people being treated within 18 weeks.

The National Health Service has already achieved waiting time standards for IAPT and we have made changes to the Mental Health Services Dataset to measure performance against the standard for Early Intervention in Psychosis.