I think there is considerable wishful thinking on this thread. There are a number of quotes from the BPS school showing they knew that the recommended therapeutic interventions were not very effective, and that any positive effects were transient, prior to PACE.
When the long-term follow-up showed patients in different arms of the study were indistinguishable, word from Oxford was that either the mere influence of the BPS school on the NHS meant that all were being treated effectively, or that the condition would go away without treatment. The idea seems to be that all you have to do is keep patients occupied for a while, without actually doing anything, and they will recover. The therapy is simply a way for the U.K. government to say it is doing something while waiting for patients to get better on their own. Making the patients responsible for treatment outcomes saves expenditures.
Patients driven to suicide are "obviously" crazy, which means you should put psychiatrists in charge of them, and ignore whatever the patient says. This is another means of shifting responsibility, so that doctors are responsible for things that go right, while patients are responsible for whatever goes wrong.
The real problem with these interventions comes from harms, which PACE pretty well avoided seeing at all. They dropped actimeter readings which might have shown patients displacing activity to participate in treatment, making it impossible to tell if total activity went up or down.
The oversight in the 6-minute walk test, allowing those who didn't feel like walking to decline the test, would also tend to exclude anyone made worse by treatment. Redefining adverse events, and serious adverse events, likewise made it harder to detect those who became worse. The discussion on harms doesn't even mention rates of hospitalization, since the authors were certain this could not have been caused by anything they did or did not do.
Without evidence of harms there is a strong tendency among politicians to claim that a cheap tacit policy of "benign neglect" is really the most effective thing available. ("See, we are doing something.") The whole subject of harms is being handled like a criminal defense aiming at the Scottish verdict of "not proven".
I don't expect a real change in U.K. policy until work elsewhere shows patients actually recovering in objectively measurable ways.