Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve access to mental health services.

We are investing an additional £2.3 billion a year to expand and transform services to enable two million more people to access mental health support by 2023-24. We have published our Mental Health Recovery Action Plan, supported by an additional £500 million in 2021-22, to address waiting times for mental health services. This includes £79 million to expand support in children and young people’s mental health services and £110 million to expand adult mental health services, including psychological therapies.

In addition, NHS England and NHS Improvement have consulted on introducing five new waiting time standards developed with pilot and early implementer sites. The consultation closed on 1 September 2021 and NHS England and NHS Improvement expect to publish the response to the consultation on the proposals by the end of this year.