Speeches by Moran.

“So they would rather just not have them in the first place?”

“That is helpful insight. What about the VCSE role?”

“When they are, how are they getting paid?”

“How do they get commissioned? Who is commissioning them?”

“I have so many questions. I promise I will not take too much time. If we can just zoom out for a moment, my questions will focus fundamentally on integrations, so early support hubs, Young Futures hubs and so on. We are doing this joint inquiry because it is spanning DHSC and the Department for Education but, as you kn…”

“Focusing on mental health support teams, as that is your expertise, there was a common pot between the two Departments. Is that where the money came from?”

“It is just NHS funding?”

“That was presumably flowed through the ICBs?”

“That did not exist, but currently funding is flowing through the ICBs?”

“So it is the ICB that decides what teams get to grow and what teams do not, and so on?”

“This is what I am trying to get to. We have a lot of turmoil going on in this space currently. I appreciate your research is long standing and this is much more recent, but are you getting a sense of any impact on these teams as a result of the turmoil?”

“The key point is that when we talk about integration with early support hubs and so on, they just do not get mentioned. That is interesting in itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I went to visit one in Devon and the vast majority of young people there were there because they felt, in their words, that school had failed the…”

“Would system-level research be helpful?”

“To drill down into CBT, the national evaluation that was published in July 2025 found that 97% of interventions were low level. Have I misunderstood that? The most frequently selected interventions used by MHST were low-intensity CBT. That is 97%, which is a huge percentage. There has been concern that some groups, in …”

“Can you paint a picture for us? If you are a child who does not have those backgrounds, you are presenting and they think you need low-intensity CBT, how many sessions would you typically get? What might it look like?”

“Six to eight?”

“The practitioner will have, as you say, a manual in front of them leading them through the activities?”

“Is it dangerous? Would you go so far as to say that?”

“Was that set up by design or by accident?”

“Focusing on mental health support teams, as that is your expertise, there was a common pot between the two Departments. Is that where the money came from?”