Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he plans to take to increase support for children experiencing mental ill health to prevent them from presenting with a mental health crisis at A&E.

Children and young people’s mental health is a top priority for this Government. We are making an additional £1.4 billion available in order to transform services with the ambition for an additional 70,000 children and young people to access National Health Service specialist services a year by 2020/21.

‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’ is supported by a further £300 million and will revolutionise provision of mental health support in schools, bolster links between schools and the NHS and pilot a four-week waiting time for access to services. A key outcome of this work will be to identify and support children and young people’s mental health needs, to help prevent them from reaching the point of crisis.