Ivan Lewis – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Ivan Lewis on 2016-03-08.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the level of investment in psychiatric services for children.
Alistair Burt
The Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Taskforce was established in September 2014 to consider ways to improve how children and young people’s mental health (CYPMH) services are organised, commissioned and provided. Evidence presented to and discussions in the Taskforce underlined the complexity and severity of the current set of challenges facing child and adolescent mental health services, including investment and funding arrangements. The work of the Taskforce resulted in the publication of the Government report, Future in Mind, which established a clear and powerful consensus about system-wide transformation to improve CYPMH.
This Government is committed to delivering this. An additional £1.4 billion has been made available over the course of this parliament to support this transformation programme, which includes investment in a range of mental health services for children and young people services, including psychiatric services. This includes £150 million to improve eating disorders and £75 million for perinatal mental health services.
Most of the additional funding is going direct to local areas to invest in transforming their services, but we need to balance this with investment nationally for workforce and system development, which sets the foundations for transformation. As this work progresses at national level, the amount going to local areas to support direct service delivery will gradually increase over the course of the five years.
Local Transformation Plans developed by clinical commissioning groups, covering all local areas, have been successfully assured by NHS England and funding was released in December 2015 to implement the Plans. These plans must cover the whole spectrum of CYPMH needs.
