Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what long-term mental health service provision they have made for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arriving in the UK.

The key mechanism to deliver the vision set out in Future in mind: Promoting, protecting and improving our children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing (March 2015), to transform children and young people’s mental health, is the Local Transformation Plans (LTPs) that all clinical commissioning groups have produced. These plans outline how local areas will meet the mental health needs of all their population of children and young people, including addressing the needs of the most vulnerable. LTPs are backed by £1.5 billion of Government funding and should cover the full spectrum of mental health issues: from prevention and resilience building, to support and care for existing and emerging mental health problems including addressing the needs of the most vulnerable, such as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. A copy of Future in mind is attached.

From 2016-17, children and young people’s mental health is being brought into the normal NHS England planning cycle so that LTPs are integrated into the wider Sustainability and Transformation Planning process. However, they will continue to be published annually.

Most unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are likely to be looked after by local authorities. An Expert Working Group (EWG) has been established to lead the development of models of care for looked-after children’s mental health. The group is co-chaired by Peter Fonagy and Alison O’Sullivan (The Association of Directors of Children’s Services) with members being drawn from across the health, youth justice, social care and education sectors, with input from children, young people, carers and families with experience of the care system.

The scope of the EWG is to primarily focus on three main groups: looked after children, care leavers, and children who have been adopted from care or are under Special Guardianship Orders. It is anticipated that there are groups within the looked after children population with specific needs and these will be considered by the Group as the work develops (for example, unaccompanied asylum seekers, children on remand, children returning to their birth parents). The Group has now met three times, with five further meetings to come, and expects to make their recommendations in October next year.