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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maggie Throup)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) for securing this debate on an important issue. I enjoyed listening to him put forward his case. He is right that health is about more than traditional medicine. We know that the social determinants of health—from our employment opportunities and social connections to the activities we do every day—play a huge role in determining our health outcomes. That has become even more evident throughout the pandemic. The Government are committed to doing everything we can to support people to lead healthier and more fulfilling lives. That is why, as our manifesto highlighted, we are committed to extending social prescribing and expanding the new National Academy for Social Prescribing.
Social prescribing is now an integral part of the NHS. The NHS long-term plan committed to having 1,000 additional social prescribing link workers in place by 2020-21—a target that was exceeded—with significantly more in the future. At least 900,000 people will be referred to social prescribing by 2023-24. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) for her personal tribute to link workers in this debate, and I pay tribute to the work that she has done and continues to do to combat loneliness.
We have recruited more than 1,500 new link workers, in addition to the many already employed by local authorities, voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises. Link workers do incredible work. They give people time, focus on what matters to the individual and take a holistic approach to health and wellbeing. They connect people to community groups and statutory services for practical and emotional support, and help people to achieve healthier and more fulfilling lives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley explained, they also ease the pressure on the health and care system.
The Government have also made funding available for primary care networks to recruit social prescribing link workers through the additional roles reimbursement scheme. NHS England is carrying out an array of measures to set the right expectation that social prescribing should be available everywhere, which my hon. Friend called for. Those measures include producing guidance for new integrated care systems and, within primary care networks, the network contract directed enhanced service specifications.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley is aware, the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), launched the National Academy for Social Prescribing in 2019. The academy brings together the arts, health, sports, the environment and other areas of national life to promote the development of wellbeing at a national and local level. It has achieved a huge amount in a short space of time. Last year, the Government committed an additional £6 million to continue supporting the academy’s work over the next two years, including its Thriving Communities programme, which my hon. Friend highlighted.
The academy has been appointed as the secretariat to the all-party parliamentary group on health and the natural environment, which my hon. Friend chairs and—as I learnt today—he set up. It is fantastic to see the work the APPG does, from exploring transformational options for the delivery of programmes that strengthen people’s connections with nature to showcasing local best practice and highlighting the latest research and evidence. As my hon. Friend has indicated, linking people to nature and the environment is an area that shows great promise in social prescribing.
That is why the Government invested £5.7 million in the cross-Government project aimed at preventing and tackling mental ill health through green social prescribing. The project will test how to increase use of and connectivity to green social prescribing services in England to improve mental health outcomes and to reduce health inequalities and demand on the health and social care system. One of the test-and-learn sites for this project was awarded to the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw integrated care system, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley is aware. This included awarding £300,000 of grant funding to 39 different projects across South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw. The projects include wilderness activities, such as bushcraft, camping in the Peak district, care farming and conservation in Doncaster, a creative recovery charity in Barnsley and an award-winning community park in Bassetlaw. I was interested to hear the ideas he put forward for his constituency of Rother Valley.
In Nottinghamshire and other areas, water-based activities are being trialled to improve mental health and wellbeing. These include paddle boarding, kayaking and storytelling along river and canal paths. An eco-therapy programme is also running in a community allotment for people with higher needs, and therapeutic horticultural activities are planned for those discharged after an inpatient stay in a mental health ward.
In Bristol, north Somerset and south Gloucestershire, a wild swimming programme is being offered to improve the mental health of women from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. There is also work going on with the Somali community to deliver woodland and food growing activities for young people who are socially excluded and at risk of poor mental health outcomes. A local mental health trust has forged a partnership with the Wildlife Trust to deliver woodland wellbeing sessions for people in recovery at a nature reserve that borders the grounds of a hospital.
Let us not forget the important role that social prescribing already plays in helping to tackle health disparities across the country. Once again, that is an issue my hon. Friend raised during his speech. The Government remain committed to levelling-up outcomes and will publish a landmark levelling-up White Paper shortly, setting out bold new policy interventions to improve livelihoods and opportunity in all parts of the UK. The aim of levelling up is to reduce the disparities between different parts of the UK. To level up effectively, we need to improve health outcomes across the country.
We are committed to reducing health disparities and the gap in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas. Social prescribing has an important part to play in levelling up. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley for bringing forward this important debate and for his continued support of social prescribing, both in his constituency and through national fora, as we expand it to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality social prescribing when they need it.
Question put and agreed to.