Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to tackle the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on children and young people’s mental health.

On March 27, we published our COVID-19 mental health and wellbeing recovery action plan, funded by £500 million in 2021/22. This includes an additional £79 million for children and young people’s mental health services. This will allow 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 (MHSTs) in schools and colleges. MHSTs will cover approximately 35% of pupils by 2023.

The NHS Long Term Plan also committed an extra £2.3billion a year for mental health provision by 2023/24, allowing 345,000 more children and young people to access these services.