Mr. John Church:

On the question of why we are here and what the committee can do, I mentioned earlier that we need to move towards parity with the budget that is there for the physical health side of things. It is easy to talk about a broken leg but, if anything comes out of Covid and this committee eventually, it is that mental health is a significant issue, particularly for children, which is our area. We need to move towards increasing the allocation for mental health.

We would absolutely support the recommendation by the Mental Health Commission to recruit 138 additional child psychologists. I mentioned earlier the pilot we are running with SilverCloud. For us, it is a no-brainer. The children are benefiting from it and we can see four times more children through this than face-to-face, although I am not saying we will stop face-to-face and we are looking at hybrid models. Some children need a bit of face-to-face and a bit of online, and some need full-time face-to-face. It is about increasing that budget and listening to those like ourselves and Barnardos with regard to the solutions. We are almost like a subcontracted service in that the Government is subcontracting to all of our agencies. We are highly trained and highly professional and we have the capacity and infrastructure to do it. We just need more funding and we can clear that waiting list. For me, personally, seeing 2,700 children on the CAMHS waiting list is totally unacceptable and it can be fixed.