Waiting times

Mr Lamb said that ambitious plans to introduce maximum waiting times for treatment across the full range of common mental health conditions was not funded and would not happen.

Financial incentives

He also criticised an NHS England decision to drop national targets to improve mental health services from the Quality Premium incentive scheme, in which local health authorities are rewarded financially for improving specific services. He said the move exposed “the appalling gulf between rhetoric and practice when it comes to mental health in the NHS”. Local areas can still get incentives for improving mental health services, but only if they choose to make it a local priority.

Research funding

Mr Lamb has written to the Jeremy Hunt to raise concerns that the public agency the Medical Research Council spent just 3 per cent of its total research budget on mental health in 2014-15. Mr Lamb called the figure “scandalously low”, and pointed out that mental health conditions represent 23 per cent of the burden of disease in the UK.