England dashboard: 1.4 million waiting for mental health care as NHS outlines £21.4bn 2026/27 plans

More than 1.4 million people in England were waiting for mental health assessment, treatment or support at the end of July, according to NHS England’s first quarterly overview dashboard for mental health, learning disability and autism, which also shows the NHS plans to spend £21.376 billion on related services in 2026/27. The new public snapshot, released Thursday, is the first of its kind to bring those measures together in one place and includes spending data not published elsewhere.

The publication, “Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Overview Statistics, Quarter 1 2026-27,” was released by NHS England on Sept. 17 and covers England. It is the first edition of a new quarterly dashboard that pulls together selected measures from existing NHS statistical series and aligns them with the NHS 10-Year Health Plan, the Medium Term Planning Framework 2026/27–2028/29 and the NHS Oversight Framework 2026/27. The figures in this first release are current to July 2026.

Its first headline figure shows 1,415,045 people of all ages were waiting for access to assessment, treatment and support within the wider mental health sector at the end of July. Among children and young people, 75,739 people ages 0 to 17 with mental-health-related referrals were waiting more than 104 weeks for help from community mental health services. The dashboard also recorded 285 active inappropriate out-of-area placements at the end of July for adult acute, older adult acute and psychiatric intensive care services, against an NHS target of zero by the end of 2027/28.

The dashboard’s performance measures show mixed progress. In the last month to July 2026, 72% of new urgent referrals to community crisis services received a first face-to-face contact within 24 hours. In NHS Talking Therapies, 62,318 courses of treatment were completed in the month, and 46.9% of those completed courses achieved reliable recovery. The dashboard sets a target of 51% reliable recovery by the end of 2026/27 and a volume target of 805,000 courses delivered in the 12 months ending March 2027.

The most clearly new information is on spending. NHS England said in the dashboard’s background material: “The main exception to this is the data on financial spend, which is only published here.” The dashboard shows total planned spend across mental health services in 2026/27 at £21.376 billion, compared with actual spend of £21.193 billion in 2025/26, an increase of about 1%.

Within that, planned spending under the Mental Health Investment Standard, the rule requiring integrated care boards to maintain or increase the share of spending devoted to mental health, is £13.999 billion in 2026/27. On a like-for-like basis, that compares with £13.739 billion of actual Mental Health Investment Standard spending in 2025/26. Integrated care boards, the NHS bodies responsible for planning and commissioning services locally, are all 42 planning to meet the standard in 2026/27, after all 42 met it in 2025/26.

The dashboard also shows planned spending on learning disability, neurodevelopmental conditions and dementia at £4.694 billion in 2026/27, down 2.2% from £4.799 billion actually spent in 2025/26. Integrated care boards are planning to spend 14.3% of their base funding allocation on mental health services in 2026/27, compared with 14.6% actually spent in 2025/26 on a like-for-like basis.

Most of the service data in the new overview come from existing official monthly statistics, now consolidated into a single quarterly England-wide dashboard. The financial figures are planned spending, not final outturns, and NHS England said actual 2026/27 spending will be reported in the Quarter 4 publication.