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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 again, Ms Rees, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) for securing the debate. I know that she is passionate about the Healthy Start scheme and the wider issue of children and young people. I also thank the other hon. Members who contributed this morning.
The Government welcome the opportunity to discuss the Healthy Start scheme and how it is benefiting hundreds of thousands of families across the country. Eating a healthy and balanced diet in line with the “Eatwell Guide” can help prevent diet-related disease, ensuring that we get the energy and nutrients needed for good health and for maintaining a healthy weight throughout life. As the hon. Lady outlined, the Healthy Start scheme is one of the ways that the Government continue to target nutritional support at the families most in need, which is increasingly important in view of current pressures on the cost of living. The scheme helps to encourage a healthy diet for pregnant women, babies and children under four from low-income households. It offers support to buy fresh, frozen or tinned fruit and vegetables, fresh, dried or tinned pulses, plain cow’s milk, and infant formula. Beneficiaries are also eligible for free Healthy Start vitamins.
Healthy Start is a passported benefit, with eligibility based on the receipt of welfare benefits and tax credits under certain earnings thresholds. Women who are at least 10 weeks pregnant and families with a child under four years of age are eligible for the scheme if they claim income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, child tax credit with an annual family income of £16,190 or less, universal credit with family take-home pay of £408 or less per month, or pension credit. Pregnant women on income-related employment and support allowance are also eligible for the scheme. In addition, anyone aged under 18 who is pregnant is eligible for Healthy Start, regardless of whether they receive benefits. Once they have given birth, they must meet the benefit criteria to continue receiving Healthy Start. Pregnant women and children aged over one and under four each receive £4.25 every week, and children aged under one receive £8.50 every week, as well as free Healthy Start vitamins.
Our commitment to the Healthy Start scheme is demonstrated in both the voucher value increase of over 37% in April 2021, and the strategic move from a paper-based service to a digital one. I am extremely pleased that there have been over 400,000 successful applications to the Healthy Start digital service since its launch. Of those, 37% are households brand new to the scheme. The figures show that by providing a modern and efficient digital Healthy Start service, we have addressed the barriers created by the legacy paper-based service and have encouraged more eligible families to join.
Following user research and testing, we have replaced the paper application form with an online application that provides an instant decision for many families. We have also swapped paper vouchers, which beneficiaries told us could be lost, damaged, inconvenient or stigmatised to use, with a prepaid card. I take on board the hon. Lady’s point that cards can be stigmatising when they go wrong, but a prepaid card that is loaded with Healthy Start benefit payments is an improvement. I am aware that there have been teething issues, which is to be expected when transitioning from a legacy service to a new digital service. However, we have been working to address those issues with the NHS Business Services Authority that operates the Healthy Start scheme on behalf of the Department.
Kate Green
I am grateful for the tone of the Minister’s response. In relation to addressing the teething problems with NHS digital and business services, I understand that work with local steering groups has now ceased and there are no longer regional co-ordinators to feed back problems. Will the Minister look at ensuring that those on the frontline are able to continue to feed intelligence to the NHS, and receive intelligence back about improvements that are being made?
Maggie Throup
Yes, we always need to make sure that we know what is happening on the frontline so that we can keep improving services.
Since 1 April this year, over 1.5 million calls have been made to the automated Healthy Start helpline. The helpline supports beneficiaries to self-serve on topics such as activating their cards, reporting lost or stolen cards, and checking their balance without needing to speak to an agent. The NHS BSA analysed the issues that applicants and beneficiaries may experience when applying for and using the Healthy Start scheme, and it has acted on the findings. In particular, it has invested more resources so that agents are handling calls and resolving them first time—an issue that was brought up early in the scheme. Currently, the average call wait time is down to just 31 seconds, which is a vast improvement. I am grateful to the NHS BSA for its work on harnessing the power of social media by engaging with over 15,000 messages since April this year. I also extend my thanks to Iceland—the supermarket, not the country—which continues to find novel ways to support and promote the scheme. The hon. Lady mentioned other supermarkets that we would be delighted to engage with.
At a time when families are increasingly aware of the cost of living and the need to provide their children with a healthy diet, the Government are committed to helping the most vulnerable. I will try to get through a few of the other questions in the time that we have. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) wanted to make sure that no one was missed in the transition. Since September 2021, the NHS BSA has directly contacted all households receiving Healthy Start vouchers to invite them to apply for a prepaid card, including three invite letters, two leaflets, emails and text messages. The Government continue to look at ways to support households to ensure that they are aware they can take up the offer, and the NHS BSA recently provided training to staff at the Department for Work and Pensions to raise awareness of the Healthy Start scheme. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned DWP and I think it is important that everybody is working together on these issues.
Healthy Start eligibility is kept under continuous review and aligns closely with other passported benefits across Government. There are no current plans to expand eligibility for the scheme with regard to the onus threshold or the qualifying age range but, as I said, we always keep such schemes under review. We have talked about the current cost of living and food inflation, and the Healthy Start scheme is kept under review from this point of view as well. The voucher value rose from £3.10 to £4.25 in April 2021—an increase of 37%. We have no current plans to increase the value of the Healthy Start scheme.
The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston raised the cost of calls to the helpline. In line with national and other Government agencies, the NHS BSA transferred from 0845 numbers to 0300 or 01 or 02 numbers as part of the fair telecoms campaign. Telephone companies include calls to 0300 numbers in the free minutes of some call plans. Any call charges outside of a plan are charged at a local rate, which is set by the caller’s provider, so calls to the NHS Healthy Start telephone helpline are charged at a local rate if they are not part of an inclusive package. We now have a separate automated telephone helpline that is available 24 hours a day, which will help people with a lost or damaged card or to check their balance—as the hon. Lady said, issues that are not complex but much easier to resolve through an automated system.
Of course, people can apply via email and through the NHS Healthy Start Facebook and Twitter social media channels, so there are ways to access the service without paying for the phone call. We recognised some of the teething problems that were seen on the telephone lines, and hopefully the hon. Lady will see that we have now made vast improvements.
The hon. Lady talked about automatic enrolment through universal credit or local authorities. However, the Healthy Start card is a financial services product, which means that the person using it has to take on certain responsibilities. There therefore needs to be that acceptance of authorisation. The hon. Lady is looking confused—I will write to her with more details, rather than try to explain it in the short time I have left.
The hon. Lady also talked about cost of living pressures potentially increasing existing disparities. The Government are committed to levelling up health across the country and will continue to work to close the gap in health outcomes between different places and communities so that people’s backgrounds do not dictate their prospects for a healthy life. I know that that is very close to the hon. Lady’s heart; it is very close to mine as well.
I have hopefully covered many of the issues that have been raised by the hon. Members for Stretford and Urmston and for Liverpool, West Derby. As I say, I will write to the hon. Lady about the financial services product. If there are any other outstanding issues, I am happy to have further correspondence with her. I close by thanking the hon. Lady for raising this important issue and other hon. Members for their contributions. As always, we will keep the Healthy Start scheme under review to ensure it provides support for those families who need it the most.
Question put and agreed to.