Ms Mary Nicholson:

With regard to the voice of the child, I do not necessarily think that this is the environment, but a mechanism to ensure that children are represented should be found. On what we would really like to see, I will add to what Ms Saoirse Brady said. If there were 24-hour services, it would prevent many things from escalating. It would sometimes prevent the need for other things, along with early intervention. Sometimes, there is a view that 24-hour services cost much money. It is not about that for us. If one looks at the North, it has an out-of-hours 24-hour social work service, and part of that social work service has a huge amount of mental health professionals within it. The social workers are trained in mental health, and that costs £3.6 million a year to run. That is not a huge amount of money to provide 24-hour support for child protection and mental health, whatever the needs of the child and people in the community are.