Found: Correspondence to Baroness Merron re maternity and neonatal services investigation Correspondence

Found: Correspondence from Baroness Merron re Follow up on 10 September session Correspondence

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 25 September (HL10725), whether abortion statistics for England and Wales for the years (1) 2023 and (2) 2024 will be published in 2025.

Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The publication dates of the Abortion Statistics for England and Wales publication for the years 2023 and 2024 have not yet been announced. Publication of the 2023 data is provisionally planned for winter 2025/26. We will announce the date of the 2024 data publication in due course.

The statistics have been delayed due to several operational issues. These include issues associated with moving to a new data processing system and an increase in the number of paper abortion notification forms to process.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 15 October (HL10682), whether they will publish the notes of the meetings with the promoters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and the actions taken as a result of those meetings in the Library of the House.

Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government does not intend to place the requested advice or correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill into the Library of the House.

Government advice and correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is in line with Government policy to ensure coherence of the statute book, and to help to ensure the bill is workable, whilst remaining neutral on the matter of assisted dying. In relation to legislative consent motions, requesting legislative consent motions from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is a matter for the sponsor. The Government continues to offer technical advice to ensure the devolution settlement is respected.

The Department recognises the importance of promoting openness and transparency in Government. However, it is also in the public interest that the Government can engage confidentially with the sponsors of the bill, so that the advice the Department provides in relation to the operability and soundness of the bill can be free and frank, both in relation to this bill and any future private member’s bill where the Government engages closely with the sponsor.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 30 October (HL10679), other than the bill team, how many officials are working in (1) the Department of Health and Social Care, (2) NHS England, on evaluating or devising implementation of the policy set out in the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.

Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government is neutral on the principle of assisted dying and whether the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill becomes law.

Currently there is no implementation team. Bill officials are currently working to fulfil the Government’s duty to the statue book, providing technical drafting support and technical workability advice on clauses. Should the bill gain Royal Assent, some of this work could be deployed to inform an implementation programme.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 25 September (HL10725), how many civil servants were (1) working on compiling the abortion statistics for England and Wales from 2023 onwards, and (2) how many additional civil servants have been working on these statistics as a result of the delay in publication.

Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

A range of people working in different roles, civil service grades, and professions work on compiling the abortion statistics for England and Wales. This includes analysts, data entry specialists, policy professionals, and publications and communications specialists, whose contributions towards the abortion statistics publication make up varying degrees of their core role. For this reason, it is not possible to fully quantify the number of individuals compiling the abortion statistics. However, in the two main teams, the Department’s abortion statistics and abortion data entry teams, the combined number of staff, which represent the number of individuals rather than the number of full-time equivalent staff, below Senior Civil Servant grade was nine on 2 January 2023 and 10 on 17 October 2025.

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on improving continuity of care for repeat offenders as they move between prison and the community.

Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip

We recognise that the first few weeks after release for prison leavers are high-risk for relapse, overdose and reoffending, and we are determined to ensure prison leavers have a smooth transition into the community, with swift access to care and treatment to address this.

Lord Timpson, the Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending continues to engage with Baroness Merron and Minister Dalton, Minister for Public Health and Prevention in the Department for Health and Social Care, to discuss issues related to offender health and care and drive progress forward. The Drug and Alcohol Recovery Expert Panel (DAREP), chaired by Lord Timpson, was established to identify key areas for improvement in our current approach to tackling problematic drug and alcohol use in the criminal justice system in England and Wales, including consideration of continuity of care and resettlement. Minister Dalton is part of DAREP’s core membership.

Working closely with health partners, we have recruited over 50 Health and Justice Partnership Coordinators. These staff operate nationwide to strengthen links between prison, probation and treatment providers. NHS England’s RECONNECT service also supports prison leavers with vulnerabilities to engage with the right health services in the community through referrals and peer support. We are also improving information sharing between treatment providers and probation and enabling virtual pre-release appointments with community treatment providers via secure laptops.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Baroness Merron on 20 October (HL Deb col 480), in what way is the Mental Health Act "very significant" in supporting people with learning disabilities to access NHS services.

Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government’s 10-Year Health Plan sets out to tackle health inequalities and people with disabilities are a priority for care from a neighbourhood team with more holistic, on-going support. Ahead of this, action is underway to improve access and support through staff training, proactive health checks and plans, and the Mental Health Act reforms.

The Government knows that people with a learning disability and autistic people have poorer health outcomes than the general population, including, on average, dying younger. They continue to experience disparities in the quality of care they receive, which may include barriers to accessing the right support.

The Government is rolling out the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism to the health and adult social care workforce to ensure staff have the right knowledge and skills to provide safe, informed care. Oliver’s Training is the Government’s preferred package for providers registered with the Care Quality Commission to meet the statutory training requirement under the Health and Care Act 2022. Over three million people have completed the e-learning package, the first part of this training, and more than 2,700 people have been trained to deliver the interactive second part nationwide.

Annual health checks for people with a learning disability are a crucial way to identify undetected conditions early and ensure the appropriateness of ongoing treatments. NHS England is working with people with lived experience, clinical professionals, and commissioners to produce a quality framework to ensure that these vital checks are high-quality. NHS England is also taking forward a range of work to improve the quality of the services accessed by people with a learning disability, including rollout of the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag across health and care services which enables health and publicly funded care professionals to record, share, and view details of the reasonable adjustments which individuals need to support their care and treatment.

The number of people with a learning disability and autistic people in mental health hospitals is unacceptable, and there are still too many people being detained who could be supported to live well in their communities. The Mental Health Bill currently before Parliament limits the scope of the ability to detain people with a learning disability and autistic people so that they can only be detained under Part 2, section 3 if they have a co-occurring mental disorder that requires hospital treatment. It also introduces measures to improve community support, including putting Care (Education) and Treatment Reviews and Dynamic Support Registers on a statutory footing, and placing certain duties on integrated care boards and local authorities when exercising existing commissioning duties.