This is how it works in my area at least (adult service)
All services are commissioned by Gps. They decide how much money each service gets given to offer the local mental health service.
My teams commissioners for example decided that our team no longer had funding for any ASD interventions. None. They decided that there was no funding for that in our area and people can be offered a one off assesment.
They allocate money based on us accepting "severe and enduring mental illness", this means technically those with depression, anxiety, reactions to life stressors (eg my last referral was a lady who had lost a child, and had multiple miscarriages) arent included
In general our service is funded on the assumption we will take on a certain percentage of referrals etc and that each person will have as an average 6 sessions of treatment. However the people we can offer those 6 sessions to now, are so much more unwell because of the referral criteria being so high. So in theory we should be offering average 6 sessions to people who have attempted suicide, are actively psychotic etc.
The comissioners seek out the "best deal" for who can provide services. So for example in our area funding for things like support groups, carers groups, or in your case support workers (those that would be coming out to support people to get out of the house, doing graded exposure) etc all goes to charities near us. Those charities have their own exclusion criteria that we have a mental health service have no control over. We are told we no longer need funding for this as they have paid else where to provide it
Obviously places bend the rules, for example do work on getting people with severe anxiety out of the house. However my job is "planned" so i know how many sessions i need to be providing in a week. For every session i provide over the 6, leaves someone else on a waiting list. I wont even go into how massively cost ineffective this is. Community care is cheap but poor, so people end up needed more expensive care that means theres less money to go round again. Throwing good money after bad.
This makes working there high stress, naturally our turnover of staff is massive. Each time a member of staff leaves their case load gets put in other members of staff, many places have rolling job adverts where by the time they recruit someone else has left. Quality of care goes down again, experienced staff become few and far between. Staff that understandably want to give better quality of care leave.
The analogy i use to explain it to my family is as follows.
You are a school dinner lady, you have been told you only need two staff members this shift and have minimun food in the kitchen. The queue is out the door, so you start trying to figure out who is most hungry.
You go to a table and they are vegetarian but clearly in need of food, you tell them you gave all the veggie stuff to the other cafe opposite, they should go there. They tell you the cafe is closed, the food is awful, and told them that they were too hungry so to come here.
You dont want to leave them without food, so you pick some of the food off other kids plates, spreading the meals thinner. You know the food the veggie is getting isnt nutritionally complete but its better than nothing right?
Theres a kid that was mildly hungry but youve spent too much time with the other tables so now they are ravenous and need even more food
The other really hungry kids, are looking at their food and saying "surely there must be more than this?". The food is keeping them from passing out, but isnt enough to keep them going in the long term. They will be back in a few hours.
The really good cooks are leaving saying that cant make the food spread out anymore. You go to a table who tell you that they told this all to the person before, you're the third member of staff and they are no closer to the food
Funding isnt the only issue, but its genuinely at the heart of many issues. If we could retain staff then we might stop treading water and be able to look beyond just keeping people safe