Does Rishi Sunak understand the scale of the mental health crisis?

Unsurprisingly, health spending will be a key part of Rishi Sunak’s spending review announcements this afternoon, with the Chancellor expected to pledge £3 billion for the NHS as it recovers from the pandemic. Part of that will be a £500 million boost for mental health, which accompanies a ‘winter care plan’ that was published earlier this week. Ministers are very keen to say they recognise the pressure that the pandemic has put on services and people who may be developing mental health problems for the first time, as a result of the strain they have found themselves under this year.

But this money won’t go very far. The Strategy Unit within the NHS has developed a mental health surge model, which suggests that new referrals alone will rise by 11 per cent every year for the next three years, and the cost of this will be over £1 billion a year. The analysis makes clear that ‘these figures are in addition to the approximately 500,000 people that were not able to access services during the first national lockdown’.