Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to ensure that adequate funding is directed to local mental health bodies to reduce waiting times for child mental health care.

In total the Government has made available an additional £1.4 billion over the course of this Parliament to support significant transformation in children and young people’s mental health so that there is easy access to the right support from the right service when it is needed.

The key mechanism in delivering this transformation programme, as set out in the Future in Mind report, are the Local Transformation Plans (LTPs) that all clinical commissioning groups covering all local areas have produced. These plans should meet the needs of all the local population and cover the full spectrum of services needed to ensure that children and young people can access services when they need to.

NHS England’s Local Transformation Planning guidance issued in August 2015 and the robust assurance process around it, backed by a programme of regional and national support, are in place to ensure that the additional money will be spent for the purposes intended and that locally determined key performance indicators will be met. NHS England will continue to support local areas to refresh their LTPs to take and merge into the wider Sustainability and Transparency Planning process.