Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure that policy decisions on children’s mental health provision reflect the full range of evidence-based interventions, including counselling, rather than prioritising only interventions with randomized control trial data.

All interventions delivered by National Health Service mental health services are evidence-based and use a range of clinical evidence. This includes counselling services.

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines make evidence-based recommendations on a wide range of topics to guide planning, commissioning, and practice across the health and social care system, including for children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. These recommendations are based on the best available evidence, reflecting a range of evidence and information from scientific research using a variety of methods, to testimony from practitioners and people using the services.