Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to support local authority provision of mental health services for child refugees.

Health services are the responsibility of the Department of Health. Child refugees are entitled to the same rights as other looked-after children and young people, including access to National Health Service (NHS) mental health services. The NHS actively seeks to meet the unique needs of a wide range of vulnerable groups, including asylum seekers of all ages, and local NHS services have legal duties to meet the varied needs of their population. Access to Mental Health services is based on clinical need. To improve the offer to all children, the Government published The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper on 4 December. This sets out an ambitious set of proposals to transform support for children and young people’s mental health generally.

Refugee resettlement programmes can also provide an avenue towards mental healthcare. Under resettlement programmes, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and Local Health Boards can claim a per capita amount for primary and secondary healthcare costs – including mental health costs – for refugees they support. If per capita costs are exhausted, CCGs and Local Health Boards can claim additional funding for secondary healthcare costs identified during the first 12 months of a refugee's arrival. Funding decisions do not rest with the Department for Communities and Local Government but with the Home Office, which is accountable for the Resettlement Programme.

Local authorities have been invited to bid for funds to assist their capacity to support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) through the Controlling Migration Fund. The Department for Communities and Local Government manages part of this fund, and bids have included interventions to support UASC mental health. The bidding opportunity has closed and we will be announcing the results of this programme early in the New Year.