Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his will make it his policy to work with the eating disorders charity Beat to (a) access the most recent data on issues facing people with eating disorders, (b) support people with eating disorders and (c) allocate additional funding (i) to tackle the causes and (b) for the treatment of those conditions.

Departmental Ministers and officials engage a wide range of expert organisations to inform its policies and this includes Beat. We recently announced over £9 million of funding support for charities supporting vulnerable people through the COVID-19 pandemic. We were delighted to announce that Beat has been awarded grant funding through this process to continue the valuable work it does in supporting people with eating disorders.

The Government is also funding a new eating disorder study jointly led with King’s College London and eating disorder charity, Beat, via the National Institute for Health Research. The study aims to better understand what may lead to an eating disorder as well as how best we provide more effective treatment.

We are aware that NHS England has consulted Beat on work to improve adult eating disorder pathways in the community to build our understanding of how best to introduce ambitious but achievable improvements to access, quality of care and outcomes.