Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to ensure that children and young people have access to adequate mental health treatment.

This Government is committed to ensuring that children have access to high quality mental health support. We have made an additional £1.4 billion available over the course of 2015/16-2020/21 to transform services and ensure access to specialist mental health services for an additional 70,000 children and young people a year by 2020/21.

We have also introduced two waiting time standards for children and young people. The first aims for 95% of children, up to 19 years old, with eating disorders to receive treatment within a week for urgent cases, and four weeks for routine cases, by 2020. The second is that 50% of patients (of all ages) experiencing a first episode of psychosis receive treatment within two weeks of referral. We are currently exceeding or on track to meet these waiting time standards.

The Green Paper, ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision’, published by the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Education, announced creation of new Mental Health Support Teams. These teams will deliver mental health interventions for those with mild to moderate needs in or close to schools and colleges, and refer those with more severe needs on to specialist services. The Green Paper also announced the piloting of a four week waiting time to improve access to National Health Service mental health services, which we will roll out in a number of trailblazer areas alongside the support teams.