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 encourage collaboration between the (a) NHS, wider public sector and (c) charities sector to (i) identify and (ii) support those at risk of suicide.

We updated the Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy last year to strengthen delivery of its key areas for action across Government, its agencies and other sectors including the voluntary and charitable sector. The Government has worked in partnership for a number of years with a range of organisations and sectors including the National Health Service, rail industry and with voluntary and charitable sector organisations such as the Samaritans. The Government continues to provide funding for the National Suicide Prevention Alliance, established through a call to action in the 2012 Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy and comprising mostly voluntary and charitable sector organisations that work towards reducing suicide and self-harm.

We are ensuring that every local area has a multi-agency suicide prevention plan in place and we will be quality assuring those plans this year. Local multi-agency suicide prevention groups include all local organisations and services that may come into contact with someone at risk of suicide to implement tailored approaches to reducing suicide in their communities.

NHS England has been working with a wide range of suicide prevention stakeholders to set the priorities for investing £25 million on suicide prevention, between 2018/19 and 2020/21, through the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. This includes establishing a national quality improvement programme on suicide prevention across the NHS and providing funding to sustainability and transformation plan areas to improve local area multi-agency suicide prevention plans.