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 ensure that funding is ringfenced for local authorities to meet the demand for mental health support.
The public health grant supports local authorities’ statutory duty to take steps to improve the mental and physical health of their local population. The overall public health grant to local authorities in 2020/21 is £3.279 billion and this continues to be ring-fenced for health improvement.
Local authorities make their own funding decisions based on their assessment of local population need, hence we cannot specify how much is spent on individual services.