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 (a) increase the speed of and (b) support children awaiting referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

We are increasing investment into mental health services by at least £2.3 billion a year by March 2024 and have set out our aim in the NHS Long Term Plan for an additional 345,000 children and young people to be able to get the mental health support they need by March 2024. We also provided an additional £79 million in 2021/22 to help speed up the expansion of children’s mental health services. This allowed around 22,500 more children and young people to access community health services, 2,000 more to access eating disorder services and a faster increase in the coverage of mental health support teams in schools and colleges.

NHS England has consulted on the potential to introduce five new waiting time standards as part of its clinically-led review of NHS access standards, including that children, young people and their families, presenting to community-based mental health services should start to receive care within four weeks from referral. As a first step, NHS England has shared and promoted guidance with its local system partners to consistently report waiting times to support the development of a baseline position. We are working with NHS England on on the next steps.

We are also making good progress in rolling out mental health support teams to schools and colleges across England. As of spring 2022 there were 287 in place in over 4,700 schools and colleges across the country, offering support to children experiencing anxiety, depression, and other common mental health issues, some of whom may be awaiting referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. We expect this is now at around 400 teams covering 35% of pupils. Over 500 are planned to be up and running by 2024.