Mental Health and Wellbeing Leadership Board: update - September 2025

1. Introduction

At the December 2024 Leadership Board meeting, it was agreed that publication of the refreshed Delivery Plan and Workforce Action Plan would be delayed until February 2026. The Board also agreed to a set of principles to underpin the refresh. These principles are:

• There should be better alignment between future Mental Health and Wellbeing Delivery Plans and Workforce Action Plans.
• There should be more alignment with cross-portfolio work, seeking to capitalise on ongoing work in other areas that can contribute to the Strategy’s Vision and Outcomes.
• There should be fewer commitments, with a focus on quality rather than quantity. The focus should be on actions which will deliver the greatest impact.
• A set of consistent criteria should be used to inform decisions on prioritisation. These include an assessment of impact, deliverability, sustainability, affordability, and equalities and human rights.
• Consultation with stakeholders should be proportionate, including using the networks available through the Executive Group and Leadership Board.
• All commitments included in future versions of the Delivery Plan and Workforce Action Plan should contain specific timelines and clear outputs.

The Board also provided initial views on priority policy areas the forthcoming Plan should focus on.

Since the December Board meeting, Scottish Government and COSLA officials have begun collating which actions from the current Delivery and Workforce Action Plans may be candidates for inclusion in the refreshed Plan. Scottish Government policy leads and members of both the Leadership Board and the Joint Strategic Board for Child and Family Mental Health (JSB) have also provided their views on emerging policy ideas which could form the basis for actions in the refreshed Plan. Early feedback from relevant COSLA Boards and local government professional associations has also been considered. High level feedback to date has been summarised in Annex A below.

Whilst the interim report was published in June, it is acknowledged that work to progress a draft plan has not reached the stage initially anticipated, and that the proposals presented in annex A do not represent the initial set of draft actions that we had previously hoped to present to the Board at the August meeting for discussion. There are various factors for this, in particular, a desire to wait for the joint Scottish Government/COSLA Health and Social Care renewal papers to be published in June, with a view to ensuring future alignment.