Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of current inpatient capacity and waiting times for secure mental health placements for individuals detained under the Mental Health Act in (a) England (b) Greater Manchester (c) Oldham.

Nationally, NHS England collates information from annual contracts to understand the commissioned and available capacity across all adult forensic services, including high, medium, and low secure. A change notification process is managed nationally to capture in-year changes to this capacity and to monitor provider-reported activity via the Mental Health Services Dataset. NHS England does not hold information about waiting times for all individuals detained under the Mental Health Act who require admission to an adult forensic service except where the individual is transferred from prison to hospital.

NHS England and the Greater Manchester Adult Secure Provider Collaborative continue to work closely with National Health Service trusts and independent sector organisations to monitor capacity and demand for secure mental health beds for the population of Greater Manchester.

Whilst work is in progress to achieve more timely transfers into secure mental health facilities for prisoners, and work with providers around reducing overall secure length of stay, based on current demand there are sufficient adult secure beds across Greater Manchester and the wider North West region, including Oldham, to meet demand against the national adult secure specification.

Waiting list numbers are stable and consistent which indicates that commissioned provision is sufficient to meet need. As waiting lists are managed on a clinical priority basis and due to the low volumes of people requiring secure mental health services, it is difficult to provide a meaningful statistic about waiting times for admission.