Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what funding under which categories of expenditure his Department has allocated to eating disorder support services in each of the last five years.

The Department does not allocate funding to particular categories of expenditure but provides funding to NHS England for distribution to each clinical commissioning group, so that decisions can be made locally to provide a comprehensive health service for the population served.

For this year, NHS England has distributed £30 million of funding (as part of £150 million over five years commitment) to improve eating disorder services, alongside a detailed commissioning guide to inform preparations for an access and waiting time standard. This sets out the aim to see 95% of patients within four weeks and one week for urgent cases by 2020.

The funding is the first stage of a new programme to improve children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and will be used to improve community-based eating disorder services, so that patients are helped earlier and fewer need in-patient care.