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 increase the provision of accessible out of hours crisis care for young people experiencing mental health problems.

Improving mental health services is a priority for the Government and we are making available £1.4 billion up to 2020 to transform children and young people’s mental health services. We published a Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services Green Paper in 2017 setting out an ambitious programme to improve prevention, early intervention and access to children and young people’s mental health services which is supported by an additional £300 million. The Prime Minister has asked the National Health Service to develop a long-term plan over the next 10 years to meet future challenges and has been clear that improving access to mental health services should be a key element of the plan, to be published later this year.

We launched the national Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat in 2014 and every local area has a mental health crisis care concordat action plan in place setting out protocols for all local services working together to ensure that anyone experiencing a mental health crisis receives the care and support they need.

Through the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health (2016) we are investing in improving mental health crisis care which includes £249 million to implement all-age mental health liaison teams in every acute hospital by 2020 so that people presenting at hospital with a mental health problem will receive appropriate care and support from specialist mental health teams.