Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how much funding his Department has provided to mental health research and innovation programmes in the North East in each of the last two years.

The Department committed £1.81 million in 19-20 and £1.17 million in 20-21 to research projects related to mental health that took place in the North East of England. This includes research at Newcastle University which is looking at the effect of substance misuse by parents on children and research on the shift to home-based working in the pandemic, including its impact on mental health.

In addition, UKRI has recently made a £24 million investment into seven multidisciplinary and multi-institutional research programmes, across the UK, focussed on adolescent mental health. This includes research which will focus on the wellbeing of students at university where the rate of mental health conditions is rising. The project includes a co-investigator based at Newcastle University with some of the research taking place at the university.