Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of local suicide prevention plans.

Public Health England (PHE) is currently undertaking a survey of local authorities’ suicide prevention action plans and local multi-agency suicide prevention groups across England. This survey is aligned to the guidance for developing local authority suicide prevention action plans which PHE published in October. We will have the results of this shortly.

The Department will undertake work from 2017 to quality assure local multi-agency suicide prevention plans.