Every year, the NHS Benchmarking Network gathers data from mental health services for both adults and children across the UK. While raw data aggregated across mental health service providers nationwide cannot tell us about people’s experiences of these vital services, nor the quality of care they provide, it offers important insights about the scale of what they do, the resources they have, and some of the challenges they are facing day after day. It’s also unusual in that its data covers all four nations of the UK.
This year’s data, collected in the spring of 2025, gives a snapshot of both community and inpatient services for people of all ages at that time, comparing with previous years’ data to show how these have changed over time.
For children and young people’s ‘general’ mental health services, it shows that the NHS is supporting a caseload of 1,093 for every 100,000 of the population. That’s fallen from a peak of 1,639 in 2021/22. The workforce has also reduced, from 94 per 100,000 population to 79 over that same time. But the number of contacts remains the same, suggesting they are working more intensively with fewer people. On average, children spend 35 weeks on the caseloads of mental health teams, being seen 10 times during that period.
On 31 March this year, some 255,000 children and young people were on a waiting list for mental health services: two-thirds of them awaiting their first appointment, the remainder their second. Just under a third of children and young people (30%) waited less than four weeks from referral to treatment, with 31% waiting between 4 and 12 weeks, 9% waiting 13-18 weeks, and 27% more than 18 weeks. While the numbers waiting longer are still worryingly high, this is an improvement on the previous year’s figures.
Adolescent (ages 13-17) inpatient services support much smaller numbers of people than community services. On average, hospital stays are just under 78 days. Almost two-thirds (65%) of admissions are under the Mental Health Act for young people (a dramatic increase from 49% two years before). But bed occupancy rates are low by comparison with other inpatient mental health services, at an average of 63%.
The workforce in community and inpatient services for children and young people is very different. Community teams have a diverse mix of professions, while inpatient services do not. The vacancy rate in general community services is 14%, while in adolescent inpatient care it’s as high as 21%.
‘Generic’ community mental health teams for adults support 1,028 people per 100,000 population – an increase from 824 in 2021/22. Referrals have also risen, from 1,405 per 100,000 in 2021/22 to 1,801 in 2024/25. The waiting time for a second appointment with a community mental health team (CMHT) is currently just over 7 weeks (compared with 8 the year before). But there are huge variations in waiting times, from two weeks for early intervention in psychosis (services that have a mandatory waiting time target in England) to 91 weeks (almost two years – on average) for both autism and ADHD services for adults, in both cases from referral to second appointment.
Acute adult inpatient services had 185 admissions per 100,000 population in 2024/25, a reduction from 215 in 2022/23. Just over half (55%) were under the Mental Health Act, up from 47% in 2021/22. The number of acute beds has increased slightly in that time, from 20 to 22 per 100,000 – contrary to widespread reports of reductions in bed numbers. But occupancy rates are still staggeringly high for adult acute services, at 95% on average: far above recommended safe levels, as they have been for well over a decade. Lengths of stay are also rising, up by three days to 42 over the previous year in 2024/25. In low and medium secure services, meanwhile, lengths of stay are 742 and 755 days respectively – more than two years on average. Occupancy rates in these services, which account for about a quarter of all adult beds, are lower than for adult acute care, but still substantial, at 86%.
As with children and young people’s services, the workforce in community mental health services is a mix of different professional groups, whereas in inpatient services it is not. Sickness and vacancy rates are also slightly higher in inpatient services, at 7% and 14% respectively, compared with 6% and 11%. In both settings, the cost of bank and agency staffing is reducing. For adult acute inpatient services, it fell from 33% to 28% of pay costs last year, while in the community it reduced from 11% to 8%.
Older adult mental health services are often overlooked, but they do feature in NHS Benchmarking data for inpatient services. Here, the number of admissions has been stable in recent years, at 135 per 100,000 population. Some 67% are Mental Health Act admissions (up sharply from 58% in 2021/22). Bed numbers are also about the same, but occupancy has gone up to 91% (from 87% in 2021/22). Lengths of stay have reduced slightly, from 90 days on average to 84 in the last year.
The Benchmarking Network collects data on the ethnicity of people using both adult and children’s mental health services. In so doing, it illuminates the backdrop to the disproportionate use of the Mental Health Act on racialised communities in the UK. In generic community mental health teams for adults, 69% of service users are white, 6% are Black and 8% Asian (from the very broad codes for ethnicity used in the survey). Crisis resolution and home treatment teams’ caseloads are 79% white and just 2% Black and 3% Asian. But in assertive outreach teams, which provide more intensive support, some 18% of service users are Black and 9% Asian. There are also wide variations in inpatient care: as settings become more restrictive, so the proportion of Black people rises, from 8% in adult acute to 15% in medium secure. Across most services, around 10% of people had no ethnicity coding – a continued worry when transparent use of data is so important to implementing the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF).
The picture for children and young people’s services is obscured by even higher levels of uncoded data: 15% of community and 19% of inpatient service users had no ethnicity recorded. Black children represented 4% of community services’ caseloads and 8% of those in inpatient beds, compared with 5% of the population (though the absence of coding is likely to mean both figures are under-estimates). The survey also notes that while community caseloads are balanced between male and female service users, some 63% of inpatients were girls or young women.
It’s a complex but familiar picture. Mental health services are working hard to meet the needs of their populations, but they face significant pressures in both community and inpatient settings, for people of all ages. Waiting times vary widely, but there are a lot of people who are waiting for long periods for some types of service, except where there are mandatory standards in place for which providers are held accountable. The rest remain ‘hidden’ from view. Racial inequity is stark in services that are still not recording ethnicity comprehensively, but where Black people in particular are notably under-represented in some types of service but dramatically over-represented in others. Some types of inpatient care have had unsafe levels of bed occupancy for more than a decade – normalising conditions that shouldn’t be acceptable. Others, especially for children, are much less full. But the inpatient care workforce continues to have high vacancy and sickness rates, and Mental Health Act admissions continue to rise across all age groups.
This is a critical time for mental health services in all four UK nations. They’re needed more than ever, and working under pressure with constrained resources and increasingly hostile media and political narratives. They urgently need investment, not to do more of the same but to make the ‘left-shifts’ towards earlier help, more community-based support, and greater equity. Without it, we’ll continue to see the same strains on the system year after year.
