Mental Health Services: Recruitment
(asked on 1st September 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ Oral Statement of 30 June 2025 on Welfare Reform, if he will provide a breakdown by (a) location and (b) roles of the additional 6,700 mental health workers.
NHS England publishes monthly data on the National Health Service’s Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) workforce in England. This includes data on the NHS mental health workforce employed by NHS provider trusts and integrated care boards. The information presented in the debate following my Rt Hon Friend, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ oral statement on welfare reform detailed the change in the NHS’s mental health workforce between the 30 June 2024 baseline and the data for 30 April 2025.
Within the NHS Monthly Workforce Statistics series, data on the mental health workforce is included in the file titled Preliminary – NHS HCHS Workforce Statistics, Trusts and core organisations – data tables, April 2025, which is available at the following link:
Tab 21 within the file presents information on the mental health workforce broken down by both staff groups and regions, showing how the total has increased over time.
The definition of the HCHS mental health workforce includes those who are providing or supporting the provision of mental health services. Staff are included if they have either an NHS Occupation Code or Area of Work code that is related to mental health services. Further information on the mental health workforce definition, including a list of the relevant Occupation Code and Area of Work variables, can be found on the National Workforce Data Set guidance page, at the following link: