Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the availability of child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapists in (a) England, (b) the West Midlands and (c) Birmingham.

The Department does not hold data on the number of child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapists. NHS Digital provides information on psychotherapists and the number of child and adolescent psychiatrists employed in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups in England, but it does not separately identify specialist psychotherapists.

Through the Long Term Plan, the NHS has committed to ensuring that by 2023/24 at least an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 will be able to access support via NHS-funded mental health services and school or college-based mental health support teams. These teams are one of the key proposals set out in our Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health, which aims to improve the provision of children and young people’s mental health support. Health Education England’s 2019/20 Annual Mandate includes provision of training to help achieve these ambitions.