T3. Ms Forsythe asked the Minister of Health to consider a follow-up commitment to access and audit information relating to the mental health crisis in Northern Ireland, in light of the answer she received last week to a question for written answer, which asked whether, in the face of that crisis, he could detail the number of patients who were referred directly to voluntary and community sector organisations, albeit she was told that, when asked, the health and social care trusts stated that the information was not available. (AQT 373/22-27)

I thank the Member. I am disappointed that she is not satisfied with the response that she got. As a broad point, when you include the voluntary and community sector and charities, the health and social care system is a vast and very complex set of institutions and bodies, and there are an awful lot of moving parts. I am aware that, sometimes, when a Member asks a question for written answer of me, I have to say that the information is held by the health and social care trusts rather than by the Department. Sometimes, the health and social care trusts are able to provide the information, and, sometimes, they come back and say that they do not hold the information.

As I have already said on a couple of occasions in this session, data will be very important to me in how we improve and max out the capacity of the entire system. Where there are gaps, I need to know about them and need to react to them, so I thank the Member for putting that on my radar. I will take it away and ask questions about why you remain unsatisfied and why we cannot satisfy your desire.

I am pleased to chair the recently formed all-party group on voluntary and community sector. There is a real feeling in the sector that it is not valued by the Departments and its outcomes are not recognised. I invite the Minister to engage with the all-party group and perhaps attend an upcoming meeting to satisfy people that he recognises their value in this term.

I thank the Member. I must add this caution: there are so many all-party groups that I am not sure that it will be logistically possible for Ministers to start engaging across that whole sector. I sat on a number of all-party groups, so I very much recognise their importance. It is also important that the right officials from Departments attend all-party groups when it is relevant. For example, back in the day, I was very fond of sitting on the all-party group on social enterprise, and the then permanent secretary of the Department of Finance, Sue Gray, was a regular attender at those meetings. There is a way of better coordinating engagement between all-party groups and Departments at a very senior level.

I also say this to the Member. Thinking back to my experience as a victims' commissioner in the Commission for Victims and Survivors, we had maybe 100 groups that were set up to help some of the most vulnerable — people who had been hurt in the conflict, both physically and mentally. The people who were running those groups did not set them up to be chief executives, accountants or human resource managers, yet they seemed to spend a lot of the time doing those things. They spent a very significant amount of their time chasing funds on an annual basis to keep their bodies running. I am very interested in how better we support the voluntary and community sector and effectively free it up to do what it set itself up to do, which is to help vulnerable people.