Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to monitor progress by NHS England in the delivery of its Long Term Plan for the NHS against the cash figures in the NHS Funding Bill; whether those arrangements will identify specific progress in relation to mental health services and community health services, including the deployment of additional staff; and what plans they have to keep Parliament and the public informed on progress in delivering the Long Term Plan.

We have agreed a number of headline metrics against which progress on delivering the NHS Long Term Plan will be measured. NHS England published these headline metrics along with initial proposals for the specific measures to underpin them in July 2019. The metrics and proposed measures include real spend on primary and community health services, as well as on mental health services, rolling out community services response times, and the number of adults and children accessing mental health services.

We are working with NHS England and NHS Improvement to finalise the underpinning measures. Both metrics and the measures will be embedded in the Government’s statutory mandate to NHS England from 2020-21, and performance against them will therefore be reflected in the Government’s annual assessment of NHS England’s performance which includes performance against the mandate. Both the mandate and the annual assessment will be laid in Parliament and published.