The new Community Mental Health report covers neighbourhood mental health centres and a call to guarantee mental health service funding will continue to increase.
In February McPin gave evidence in Parliament on what we believe good community mental healthcare looks like.
This week the resulting Community Mental Health report was released by the Health and Social Care Committee.
It includes recommendations to government, which has two months to respond.
On reading the report it was good to see some of our examples were included, such as work on WHOLE-SMI with Newcastle University, and our evaluation of community mental health transformation pilots with Plymouth University that Harry drew on when giving his in-person evidence:
“There is a real fear that we feel from some of our colleagues about transformation. If there is constant transformation, things are not given a chance to mature and put down roots.”
Harry Dyson, expert by experience and McPin Peer Researcher & Public Involvement Officer
These recommendations include extending funding to put 24/7 Neighbourhood Mental Health Centres in every community after the initial six-month pilot.
Funding for mental health was also a key recommendation. Mental health accounts for over 20% of demand for health services but in 2025/26 it is forecast to receive 8.7% of NHS expenditure, or £15.6 billion.
While this figure is technically higher than last year, as a proportion of total NHS spending, mental health will receive less – 8.78% down to 8.71%.
As we said in February, we see that care for people with Severe Mental Illness (SMI) is fragmented, lacks a person-centred focus and too any people are left to slip through the cracks. We also emphasised the importance of lived experience leadership in services – which is reflected in the report.
There are barriers to implementing recommendations at a systems level, and improvement requires attention to culture change, integration of teams, leadership, cross-sector working and several other common themes.
Rather than protocolising each of the steps from engagement to endings, systems must encourage personalisation and flexibility and – crucially – draw on the expertise coming from lived experience in its varied forms.
We hope that the government takes the recommendations of the report as a starting point, helping us move toward compassionate, person-centred care that empowers and funds local services to deliver the support they know their communities need.
“The report demonstrates that those who gave in-person and written evidence have been heard including experts by experience. It highlights co-production approaches, lived experience leadership contributions, equity frameworks and draws upon current research – but will anything change?
“We suggested in our evidence that the knowledge to transform mental health services exists but the ability to translate that into action is a vital missing piece of the jigsaw. Let’s hope this report moves us forward with real improvements for people with SMI supported by community mental health services, wherever co-ordinated – the NHS, voluntary sector, local authority or private providers.”
Vanessa Pinfold, McPin Research Director
