Women and Equalities Committee
1 July 2026
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Women and Equalities Committee House of Commons
00:01 - 01:43
Speaker 1
Order, order. Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Select Committee. Today we're holding an oral evidence session to follow up on our report on female genital mutilation, which will probably be referred to as FGM throughout the course of this session. Today we'll hear from Baroness Merron, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women's Health and Mental Health. Welcome back, Baroness Merron.
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and CEO of the National Institute for Health and Care Research. And Professor Ramani Moonesinghe, National Clinical Director at the NHS England. So welcome to you all and thank you for coming. So the first kind of question we have is around the reconstructive surgery. And I'm going to be asking Lucy.
Happy for me to call you Lucy? Please do. Excellent. You accepted this committee's recommendation that the government fund a trial for reconstructive surgery for FGM survivors, yet both applicants who are experts in the field of reconstruction and support for FGM survivors, both applicants to the research call were rejected. And applicants were told that the funding opportunity may only be possibly re-advertised.
And I quote, possibly re-advertised. Following our invitation for you to attend this committee, you wrote to us stating that you intended to continue to take this funding forward now. Why did the NIHR not inform applicants that it still intended to fund a reconstructive surgery trial rather than simply issuing a rejection letter?
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