Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that all Sustainability and Transformation Plans reflect the Government's commitment to parity of esteem between physical and mental health.

We continue to take mental health as seriously as physical health and to hold the National Health Service to account for achieving the objectives set out in the NHS Mandate.

Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are an opportunity to improve mental health services across the country, reversing historic underinvestment and integrating them with physical health services to achieve parity of esteem. STPs provide areas with an opportunity to think more holistically across mental and physical health, rather than just in a mental health ‘section’. The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health (MH5YFV) and Dementia Implementation Plan give the NHS a blueprint for realising improvements by 2020. STPs are the mechanism for putting this into action, changing service delivery for people by the end of the decade.

The independent Mental Health Taskforce published its report in February 2016. The government welcomed the report and all 58 recommendations. The Department is working with its stakeholders to publish a detailed and robust action plan for taking forward the Taskforce’s recommendations, including how we will monitor progress and report this transparently. NHS England published its Implementation plan for the Five Year Forward View in July 2016. The implementation plan sets out common principles for local areas to follow and core elements of the programme including: children and young people’s mental health, perinatal mental health, adult mental health: common mental health problems, community, acute and crisis care and secure care, as well as wider areas such as health and justice, suicide prevention, new models of care, NHS workforce and infrastructure.

STPs are the local solutions being utilised to implement, and realise the vision of the Five Year Forward View. STPs are multi-year, high-level and place-based plans. Local footprint areas have been asked to: ensure that they have a shared understanding of where they are in relation to the three gaps (health and wellbeing, care and quality, finance and efficiency) and where they need to be by 2020/21; and build on this to enable them to present an overall coherent strategy for their footprint and identify the priorities required to realise their vision. As such, the clinical, care and service priorities, and their proposals for putting these into practice, will not be the same for each footprint area. In line with the Government’s mandate to NHS England, improvements in the delivery of mental health care and care that is more joined up to meet people’s physical health, mental health and social care needs, will continue to be delivered through existing programmes, as one of the Secretary of State priorities.