Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the use of funds allocated for mental health treatment by NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups; and what steps his Department takes to ensure that such Trusts and Groups use such funds efficiently and effectively.

The Mental Health Investment Standard requires clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to increase mental health investment in line with overall growth in their allocations. The guidance noted “Each CCG must meet the Mental Health Investment Standard (MHIS) by which their 2018/19 investment in mental health rises at a faster rate than their overall programme funding. CCGs’ auditors will be required to validate their 2018/19 year-end position on meeting the MHIS”. It is for CCGs to plan on how these funds should be deployed to develop mental health services locally.

NHS England recently published an updated Mental Health Five Year Forward View dashboard, which brings together key data from across mental health services to measure the performance of the National Health Service in delivering our plans to improve mental health services. The dashboard provides the greatest transparency ever in how the NHS is performing, alongside detail on how mental health services are funded and delivered at CCG level. As such it gives a good indication of the effectiveness with which the increased finds are translating into improved services. The dashboard can be found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/mental-health-five-year-forward-view-dashboard/

Further detail on funding and investment tracking can be found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/taskforce/imp/mh-dashboard/