§ Mr. Moonmanasked the Secretary of State for Social Services, in view of the varying amounts of money spent on community care services for the mentally sick, whether she will set up an operational research programme to evaluate those services in depth.
§ Dr. OwenWhatever the local variations, these services are all in general far from adequately developed; and the usefulness of evaluation in these circumstances is inevitably limited. In my reply to my hon. Friend on 7th May—[Vol. 873, c.190–1]—I referred to the major service developments in this field the evaluation of which my Department is sponsoring.