Government Response

The Government responded to this petition on Wednesday 5th September 2018

Mental health is a top priority for the Government. We are transforming services supported by record amounts of funding, and have ambitious plans to increase the workforce.

We want to make sure people get the right mental health care, when they need it, and that we do more to prevent mental illness in the first place.
In January 2016, the then Prime Minister announced that that the Government would invest an additional £1bn in mental health services to support implementation of the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health by 2020/21. This transformation programme covers the following areas:

• children and young people’s mental health;
• perinatal mental health;
• common mental health problems for adults;
• community, acute and crisis care for adults;
• secure care pathway;
• health and justice; and
• suicide prevention.

To help ensure that additional funding reaches the frontline, the Mental Health Investment Standard (MHIS) means that local commissioners are required to increase their mental health expenditure year on year by more than their overall allocation growth.

Spending on mental health increased to a planned £11.86bn in 2017/18.

Our progress in delivering our commitments to improve mental health services is set out in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View for Mental Health Dashboard:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/taskforce/imp/mh-dashboard/

For example:
We are exceeding performance against our waiting time standards for access to psychological therapies. Latest figures from May 2018 showed of those people who completed a course of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) treatment, 89.6% waited less than 6 weeks to enter treatment and 99.0% waited less than 18 weeks

For Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP), latest figures from June 2018 showed 76.5% of patients started treatment within two weeks, against target of treatment within 2 weeks for more than 50% of people experiencing a first episode of psychosis.
We are also making available an additional £1.4 billion for mental health services for children and young people, which will ensure that 70,000 more children and young people will access mental health services each year by 2020/21.


The Green Paper-Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision, which is supported by over £300m of additional funding on top of this, includes the following plans to improve access to services and mental health support in schools:

Incentivising every school and college to identify and train a senior designated lead for mental health in every school and college;

Creating new mental health support teams which will deliver interventions for mild to moderate mental health need in or close to schools and colleges;

Piloting a new four week waiting time for NHS children and young people’s mental health services.

Department of Health and Social Care