Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the effect of the level of mental health workforce vacancies on the quality of mental health services.

The transformation of mental health services would not be possible without the dedication and hard work of National Health Service staff. We recognise the scale of the challenge challenge but we have made progress on increasing the mental health workforce, including; addressing pensions tax concerns; increasing university clinical placements for all nursing specialities by over 5,000 more; introducing £5,000 maintenance grants for nursing students and an additional £1,000 grant for students in specialisms where we have greater workforce shortages including mental health; and bolstering the workforce through greater international recruitment.