Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to paragraph 5, of his Department's paper, Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper, how his Department will ensure that experts and stakeholders are involved in the development and evaluation of different models of delivering Mental Health Support Teams.

Development of the Green Paper included extensive engagement with experts and many stakeholders through webinars, meetings and a day long focus group with children and young people. We are also using the public online consultation to gather views on how best to implement the proposals, what selection criteria to use for the trailblazer areas which will test roll-out of the proposals and which examples of best practice we should draw on for implementing the Mental Health Support Teams.

During the consultation period, we are also working directly with stakeholders and delivery partners to inform the trailblazer programme and decisions on which delivery models we should test. We will continue to engage experts and stakeholders as we develop the detail around the teams and how they will be rolled-out. We have held various face to face events to ensure that we capture the views of those with relevant experience in this field and those who we hope will benefit from the proposals. This includes four stakeholder roundtables across the country, a parliamentarians’ roundtable and a series of focus groups with children and young people, parents/carers and professionals.