Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to tackle the reported backlog of people requiring urgent mental health support.

The NHS Long Term Plan commits an additional £2.3 billion a year for the expansion and transformation of mental health services in England by 2024 so that an additional two million people can get the National Health Service funded mental health support that they need.

To support people experiencing mental health crisis better we are delivering the commitment to make urgent mental health support universally available via NHS111, rolling-out specialised mental health ambulances, supported by £7 million of capital investment and embedding mental health professionals in all emergency operations centres and improving mental health training for ambulance staff.

To reduce pressure on urgent and emergency care, we provided our delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services which aims to deliver one of the fastest and longest sustained improvements in waiting times in the NHS's history. Through this plan we are adding 5,000 additional beds to the permanent bed base ahead of next winter and scaling up virtual wards, delivering 800 new ambulances, including the specialist mental health ambulances and expanding community services including falls, frailty and community response teams.

We have already seen average ambulance response times for Category 2 incidents improve by nearly an hour since December 2022 from 1 hour 32 minutes 54 seconds to 33 minutes 26 seconds by April 2023.