Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask His Majesty's Government how they plan to reduce the rates of deaths of despair in the North East, which has over double the rate of London; and what assessment they have made of using rates of deaths of despair to assess progress on levelling up.

The Supplemental Substance Misuse Treatment and Recovery (SSMTR) Grant is the mechanism by which local authorities receive Drug Strategy funding to increase substance misuse treatment service capacity and the quality of interventions people receive. The SSMTR Grant is made available to local authorities on the condition of maintaining existing funding through the Public Health Grant.

Details of the SSMTR Grant and the Inpatient Detox (IPD) Grant allocations for the North East are set out below.

DHSC is also providing £1,157,212 in funding to three local authorities in the North East (Middlesborough, Newcastle and Durham) to improve access to drug and alcohol treatment services for people who sleep rough or who are at risk of sleeping rough.

On 11 September 2023, the Government published a Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, with over 130 actions that we believe will make progress towards our ambition to reduce the suicide rate within two and a half years. The Strategy includes an intention to write guidance for local areas to support them to align their own strategies with the national strategy.

On 4 March 2024, we announced that 79 organisations up and down the country, including some in the North East, have been allocated funding from the £10 million Suicide Prevention VCSE Grant Fund. These organisations, from local, community-led through to national, are delivering a broad and diverse range of activity that will prevent suicides and save lives.

The Levelling Up White Paper set out 12 missions, including the health mission, focused on improving Healthy Life Expectancy and narrowing the gap between local areas where it is highest and lowest.

We are supporting people to live healthier lives, helping the NHS and social care to provide the best treatment and care for patients and tackling health disparities through national and system interventions such as the NHS’s Core20PLUS5 programme.

We are monitoring progress on a range of behavioural risk factors and underlying drivers of health, which are likely to impact on the health mission. We continue to use metrics that are publicly available and routinely updated to measure the levelling up missions, chosen to show as comprehensive a picture across the UK as possible. We are committed to developing this data picture and improving understanding of health disparities at a local level.