Paula Sherriff MP, Labour’s Shadow Mental Health Minister, commenting on the mental health workforce figures, said:

“These shocking figures show the Government is woefully failing to meet the Prime Minister’s promise to tackle the ‘burning injustice’ of inadequate treatment for mental illness.

“Ministers pledged to deliver the biggest mental health expansion in Europe and recruit twenty thousand staff but more than a year later the workforce has increased by less than a thousand – just half a per cent. More than one in ten mental health posts are vacant and nearly twenty five thousand staff – one in eight – have flooded out of the NHS in the space of just a year.

“It is clear that NHS staff and patients alike are being badly failed under the Tories. Without drastic action, their targets will be left in tatters and it will be people living with mental illness who pay the price for this terrible failure.

“A Labour Government would invest in the mental health workforce and ring-fence budgets so funding reaches the front line.”