Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to provide additional funding to mental health services in (a) London and (b) England for the purposes of tackling the backlog in treatment following the covid-19 outbreak.

As part of the Government’s commitment to build back better, we published in March our Mental Health Recovery Action Plan. The Plan is backed by an additional £500 million for this financial year, to address waiting times for mental health services, and to give more people the mental health support they need.

The majority of the funding has been allocated to systems in line with fair-shared weighted population splits, including London. More information about fair-share allocation funding in the NHS can be found at the following link: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/nhs-allocations-infographics-feb-2020.pdf