Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the CAMHS trailblazer initiative as outlined in Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper.

We have committed to establishing new mental health support teams in 20-25% of areas in England by 2023 and we are ahead of trajectory for achieving this. The first trailblazer sites became fully operational in early 2020 but it is too early to assess their effectiveness.

An independent evaluation of the implementation of the core proposals within the Green Paper has been commissioned but the evaluation fieldwork had to be temporarily paused due to the COVID-19 restrictions. The next steps for this evaluation process are currently being considered.