PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Health and Social Care - 13 May 2024 (Commons/Written Corrections)

The Cass review highlights the deterioration of mental health in young people. It particularly highlights the impact of social media, which puts awful pressures on young people. The mental health crisis obviously affects both boys and girls, but as the Secretary of State highlighted earlier, it particularly affects girls and young women. Will she continue to turbocharge child and adolescent mental health services’ crisis teams, and give them the resources that they desperately need to support our young people?

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. We want to not just help with crisis support, but prevent our young people from getting into a position of crisis in the first place, so we are rolling out mental health support teams, ahead of our schedule, across schools. That is a really important piece of work that will help 44% of the student population, but we want to go even further. In the 12-month period ending in March 2021, we increased the number of children and young people aged under 18 who received NHS-funded mental health services to some 758,000.

[Official Report, 15 April 2024; Vol. 748, c. 65-66.]

Written correction submitted by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins):

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. We want to not just help with crisis support, but prevent our young people from getting into a position of crisis in the first place, so we are rolling out mental health support teams, ahead of our schedule, across schools. That is a really important piece of work that will help 44% of the student population, but we want to go even further. In the 12-month period ending in January 2024, we increased the number of children and young people aged under 18 who received NHS-funded mental health services to some 758,000.