Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many young people under the age of 18 were referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the South East of England in each year since 2010.

Data setting out estimated number of referrals to child and adolescent mental health services in the south east of England for 2016 (May to December), 2017 and 2018 (January and February) is included in the following table.

It should be noted that this is a count of referrals and not of people; it is possible that one person could have multiple referrals in a year. It is also worth highlighting that where the number of referrals was less than five in any one month, they have not been included and that other values have been rounded to the nearest five to minimise disclosure risks associated with small numbers. As such, the totals provided are the sum of these monthly figures and so annual totals will differ from the true totals.

Data is unavailable prior to May 2016. Data on children and young people was only collected as part of the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS) from January 2016 and the relevant measures were developed in May 2016.

The number of providers which have submitted data has improved over time, and as such, figures presented here must be interpreted with these coverage changes in mind. Due to coverage issues, the number of referrals presented is likely to be an undercount and may partly explain why the number of referrals appeared to have increased so rapidly across 2016-18. It is also worth noting the total for 2016 only covers six months, and the total for 2018 only covers two months, whereas the total for 2017 covers the full 12 months. MHSDS is an experimental dataset and we expect coverage to improve over time.