Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to improve the provision of mental health services for children aged five to 16.

Protecting our children’s mental health is a priority for this Government, and a core part of the NHS Long Term Plan.

We made available £1.4 billion to improve specialist children and young people’s mental health services between 2015-21. Through the NHS Long Term Plan, mental health across all ages will receive a growing share of the National Health Service budget, worth at least a further £2.3 billion a year in real terms by 2023/24. Moreover, funding for children and young people’s mental health services will, for the first time, grow as a proportion of all mental health funding, which will itself also be growing faster than funding for the NHS overall.

In December 2018, we announced 25 Trailblazer sites which will run the first wave of 59 Mental Health Support Teams, which will be fully operational by the end of 2019. On 12 July, we announced that a further 124 Mental Health Support Teams are to be set up across 57 sites.

We remain committed to rolling out our new approach to at least a fifth to a quarter of the country by the end of 2022/23 subject to learning from the first wave.