For too long mental health services have been underfunded and understaffed with service users left to wait months or even years to receive treatment. At this year’s conference in Brighton, the Labour party set out its plan to invest in and improve mental health services across the country.

Labour’s plans would see a radical expansion of the mental health workforce, resulting in over a million more people receiving support each year, alongside unprecedented investment in children’s mental health after the disruption of the pandemic. When in government the Labour Party would:

• Guarantee mental health treatment within a month for all who need it, setting a new NHS target, ensuring that patients start receiving appropriate treatment – not simply an initial assessment of needs – within a month of referral.
• Recruit 8,500 new staff so that one million additional people can access treatment every year by the end of Labour’s first term in office.
• Put an open-access mental health hub for children and young people in every community, providing early intervention, drop-in services.
• Provide specialist mental health support in every school, so that they can support pupils and resolve problems before they escalate. This plan would see a full-time mental health professional in every secondary school and a part-time professional in every primary school.
• Improve service quality, bringing in the first-ever long-term, whole-Government plan for improving mental health outcomes, making early-intervention a reality, and broadening the range of services to those with severe mental health illnesses;
• Give mental health its fair share of funding, pledging that NHS spending on mental health will never fall and a fair share of mental health funding every time new funding is provided to the NHS.