Mental Health Services: Leeds

Greg Mulholland
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate he has made of the amount spent on transferring patients with mental health problems from Leeds to treatment centres outside the Leeds area during the period April 2007 to March 2009.

Ann Keen
This information is not collected centrally. This information may be obtainable direct from the Leeds Primary Care Trust.

Greg Mulholland
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps he is taking to improve standards of mental health care in Leeds.

Phil Hope
The responsibility for providing healthcare, including specialist mental health care services, rests with primary care trusts (PCTs). The Department provides funding for PCTs to commission, or provide healthcare for their local populations from national health service or independent sector providers. We are not prescriptive about how individual PCTs spend their budgets and each PCT decides its own spending levels for specific healthcare treatments and services.

Since 2001-02, total planned investment in adult mental health services has increased by 50 per cent. (£2.0 billion), putting in place the extra services and staff needed to transform mental health services. Nine consecutive years of increased spending by the NHS on mental health services has provided more staff, and increasing numbers of people with a severe mental illness are receiving treatment from community teams outside of hospital settings.

Our significant investment in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme (IAPT), will see annual funding rising to £173 million, 3,600 extra therapists trained and 900,000 more people treated by 2011. This investment in IAPT will help to add to the existing provision of psychological therapies, increase capacity, reduce waiting times and drive up quality standards.