Budget 2015: Children's mental health to benefit from £1.25bn investment

George Osborne’s Budget 2015 report says that £1bn will be spent on improving access to treatment for 110,000 extra children and young people from 2015/16.

A further £118m has also been earmarked for completing the expansion of the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme across the rest of England by 2018/19. This will ensure every local area has mental health workers trained in talking therapy techniques.

In addition, £75m will go towards improving mental health maternity services, while the Department for Education will provide an extra £1.5m towards piloting joint training for designated leads in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and schools to improve access to mental health services for children and young people, including the most vulnerable.

The extra investment, announced earlier this week in the government’s response to the Mental Health Taskforce report, will aim to tackle the chronic underfunding of CAMHS that has led to long waiting times for both community and inpatient treatment.

Children’s charities welcomed the announcement but said it had long been needed.

Matthew Reed, chief executive of the Children’s Society, said: “The government’s announcement of £250m a year of extra spending on mental health for children and young people is a welcome – but long overdue – move. For this to be effective, it is absolutely crucial that this money is protected and includes support specifically for 16- and 17-year-olds – too often they are forgotten and fall through the gaps.”

Kate Mulley, director of policy and campaigns at Action for Children, said: “The amount of children and young people suffering from serious mental health problems is a national crisis.

“This new funding will help to ease that crisis, but whoever forms the next government needs to commit to a shift towards early help so that children do not end up in such dire need.”

Ruth Allen, chair of The College of Social Work’s mental health faculty, added that as well as tackling the shortage of inpatient beds for young people, the funding also needed to be focused on preventative mental health support.

She added: “This means earlier treatment and care for individual young people, but it should also mean services that support whole families and social networks of support around them.”

Carey Oppenheim, chief executive of the Early Intervention Foundation, said that the investment was an indication that the government recognised many adults’ mental health problems began in childhood.

“Many of the children and young people suffering from mental health problems might have had a different journey if they or their family had received the right help at an earlier time,” she said.

“Effective and timely early intervention has been shown to work to stop problems worsening and having damaging effects. It can improve the life chances of children and young people in a way which is also better for public services and the economy. Yet our public services remain increasingly geared towards picking up the pieces from the harmful and costly consequences of failure.”

The government also announced that from 2016 it plans to offer online talking therapies for employment and support allowance and jobseeker’s allowance claimants and individuals being supported by Fit for Work, while from this summer talking therapists will be co-located in more than 350 Jobcentres.