Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how much of the additional £2.8 billion resource funding announced for the NHS in the Budget will go to mental health.

The Government is already committed to backing the National Health Service with an additional £8 billion, in real terms, by 2020/21. As part of the Budget announcement on 22 November, we have now committed to backing the NHS in England further so that by 2019/20 it will have received an additional £2.8 billion of revenue funding for frontline services than previously planned over the period. This includes £335 million this winter to help trusts to increase capacity. We have also committed £3.5 billion of new capital investment by 2022/23 to transform its estate and drive further efficiency savings.

The use of this funding allocation is a matter for NHS England. Decisions on funding have yet to be made, but the Mental Health Investment Standard makes clear that mental health investment must increase as a proportion of each clinical commissioning group’s spend each year.

The Government is committed to parity of esteem between mental health and physical health and delivering the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. We have backed this with a significant increase in funding – spending on mental health has increased to a record £11.6 billion, with a further £1 billion on top of this by 2020/21. We are also investing an additional £1.4 billion in mental health services for children and young people.