For many people, the difference between coping and reaching crisis is not a single service. It is a combination of trusted relationships, stable housing, practical support, community connection, social care, advocacy, employment, and timely clinical help.

Mental health charities already provide prevention, crisis alternatives, supported housing, peer support, employment support, mental health social care, culturally responsive services, helplines, advocacy, and specialist provision. These are not peripheral additions to the system; they are part of how people stay well, recover, and live independently.

We want reform to start from that reality, with community providers involved in design, delivery, leadership, and accountability from the outset.

Neighbourhood health offers an opportunity to organise support around people and places rather than institutional boundaries. Through our work co-chairing the VCSE network for six neighbourhood mental health centre pilots, we are bringing practical learning about partnership, warm handovers, outreach, shared decisions, lived experience, and sustainable community provision into national discussions about expansion.

Mental health social care helps people maintain relationships, find or keep a home, participate in work and community life, and manage daily life in ways that support recovery and independence. We work with members, ADASS, DHSC, the Care Provider Alliance, and wider partners to make sure this support is part of mental health and adult social care reform from the beginning, rather than added later.

Mental Health Act implementation and severe mental illness standards will shape people's experience of services for years to come. We bring community provider and lived experience perspectives into this work, including on consent, detention, advance choice, crisis support, housing, advocacy, and accountability across different parts of the system.

Investing earlier should not narrow access for people with more severe or fluctuating needs, and local models should not erase specialist provision serving communities across wider areas. We argue for reform that can do both: support people earlier and closer to home while protecting specialist and culturally responsive services.

We also keep inequalities in view. A service is not automatically equitable because it is local. Good reform has to understand who is not reaching support, whose needs are missing from the data, and which community organisations already hold trusted relationships with people who face the greatest barriers.