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 implement maximum waiting times for adult inpatient mental health care; and what progress he has made on the maximum waiting time pilots.

NHS England has committed in the interim report of the Clinically-Led Review of Access Standards to testing a range of new access standards for mental health, including for crisis services in the community and liaison psychiatry services, four week waiting times for children and young people who need specialist community mental health services and four week waiting times for adults and older adults to access community mental health teams.

Testing of these new access standards are underway in pilot areas. An update on the testing of the new mental health access standards will be set out in the final report of the Clinically-Led Review of Access Standards to be published later this year. Once recommendations are made, following field-testing of the proposals within the National Health Service, the Government has committed to studying them carefully.