Contract for 500 children’s mental health appointments in North Wales falls through

News •
March 21, 2026 at 5:01 am

A private provider contracted to deliver 500 extra mental health appointments for children in North Wales has failed to meet its obligations, a senior Welsh Government official has told a Senedd committee.

Nick Wood, deputy director of the NHS in Wales, told the Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister on 13 March that the contract was put in place at the beginning of 2026 to help clear a backlog of young patients who had waited longest for services.

“The contract was put in place at the beginning of this year with a provider to provide an extra 500 appointments for those that had waited the longest,” Wood said. “Unfortunately, that provider has been unable to provide all of those.”

He said the health board was “now looking to other providers to seek to remove the backlog there.”

Wood said access to children’s and younger people’s mental health services in North Wales had “gradually improved over the last 12, 18 months in terms of access to services” but acknowledged the position remained inadequate.

“It’s still too long, and I think we’ve said that all of those access arrangements are too long,” he said. “But there has been quite a lot of improvement over the last 12, 18 months in terms of access arrangements and the number of patients who have waited a long time.”

The comments came during questioning by North Wales MS Mark Isherwood, who told the committee he was “being contacted virtually daily now by voluntary sector organisations delivering key services to disabled and autistic children and their families that are either closing or having to shrink their services.”

Isherwood said these charities had “survived the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and the previous decades when we’ve had all sorts of problems thrown at us. Yet, now, they’re having to shrink their services or close.”

He asked the First Minister to respond to their view that “there is a disparity between what the Welsh Government says and what it delivers.”

First Minister Eluned Morgan did not directly address the contract failure but defended spending to bring down waiting lists in North Wales.

“Let me be clear: I’m not going to apologise for bringing in people to bring down the waiting list, particularly in Betsi,” she said. “There are people who’ve been suffering on waiting lists for way too long, and if it takes us to pay people to come in and clear people, to try and sort people out, who’ve been on the waiting list for a long time – I’m not going to apologise for that.”

She described the approach as a “very short-term measure” and pointed to longer-term plans including a new orthopaedic hub in Llandudno and investment in the Royal Alexandra Hospital for step-down beds.

The provider that failed to deliver the contract was not named during the session.

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