Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, responding to the Public Accounts Committee report on children’s mental health services, said:
“I welcome this report, which I called for and which echoes the evidence I gave to the Select Committee warning that significant improvements to children’s mental health services are desperately required because too many children are failing to receive any support at all.
“The NHS 10 year plan will improve access to CAMHS for more children, but until the Government can guarantee that all children will get the specialist help they need, every year thousands of children will still miss out on treatment. The Government must be more ambitious about the resources and reforms needed to ensure every child who needs support receives it, when they need it. That will require policies like an NHS-funded counsellor in every school to identify and tackle problems early, and closer parity between what is spent on adult and child mental health services.”
