Alex Baker

Improving services for passengers is at the heart of our plans to improve Britain’s railways, and station staff play an important role in supporting passengers, especially those who require additional assistance. This Government has no plans to close ticket offices, and we expect train operating companies to take measures to ensure they are open at published times.

The information requested regarding the average cost of bus fares is not available. The Department produces quarterly bus fare statistics in the form of a local bus fares index. However, this data is not available specifically for (a) Aldershot constituency, or (b) Hampshire. Data is available for (c) England and the latest publication can be found on GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/quarterly-bus-fares-statistics-january-to-march-2024.

The information requested regarding (a) car ownership, (b) bus usage (c) light rail usage, (d) train usage and (e) active travel usage in Aldershot constituency is not available. Geographic availability of data differs depending on the data source. Where possible, information has been provided for the constituency of Aldershot. Otherwise, statistics for the local authority of ‘Rushmoor’, county of ‘Hampshire’, or the area of ‘Hampshire and Isle of Wight’ are provided where relevant.

Car ownership

According to the Department’s vehicle statistics, there were 138,805 licensed cars as at end March 2024 in the Aldershot Constituency.

Bus usage

According to the Department’s annual bus statistics, in the year ending March 2023 there were 20.8 million local bus journeys taken in Hampshire.

Train usage

The Regional Rail Usage Statistics published by the Office of Rail and Road show that in the year ending March 2023 there were 25.0 million passenger rail journeys within the South East of England that started or ended in Hampshire and Isle of Wight. There were also 15.3 million journeys that started or ended in Hampshire and Isle of Wight that started or ended from regions outside the South East of England.

Active travel usage

According to the Department’s annual walking and cycling statistics, between November 2022 and November 2023, 66.4% of adults walked or cycled, for any purpose, at least once per week in Rushmoor (Non-Metropolitan District). The equivalent figure for Hampshire (County) is 73.6%.

The Government takes the condition of local roads very seriously and is committed to maintaining and renewing the local road network. Hampshire County Council (HCC) is the local highway authority for the Aldershot constituency, and it is therefore responsible for the maintenance of the local road network. HCC will receive £37.7 million from this Department during 2024/25 to enable it to carry out its local highway maintenance responsibilities. Funding for future years is a matter for the Spending Review.

Tackling child poverty is at the heart of this Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity.

The Child Poverty Taskforce, co-chaired by the Work and Pensions and Education Secretaries, has started urgent work to publish the UK wide Child Poverty Strategy in Spring and will explore all available levers to drive forward short and long-term actions across government to reduce child poverty.

The vital work of the Taskforce comes alongside the Government’s commitments to roll out free breakfast clubs at all primary schools, setting every child up at the start of the day ready to learn, expanding childcare to deliver work choices for parents and life chances for children, provide stronger protection for families who rent privately as well as deliver our plan to make work pay.

The Government is also extending the Household Support Fund for a further 6 months, from 1 October 2024 until 31 March 2025. An additional £500 million will be provided to enable the extension of the HSF, including funding for the Devolved Governments through the Barnett formula to be spent at their discretion, as usual. This means that Local Authorities in England will receive £421 million to support those in need locally.

Information relating to Pension Credit eligibility is only available via take-up statistics. The latest available Pension Credit take-up statistics for Great Britain cover the financial year 2021 to 2022 and are available at: Income-related benefits: estimates of take-up: financial year ending 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). However, these statistics are only available at Great Britain level and cannot be broken down to smaller geographical areas.

No such assessment of inflation on living standards has been made.

The Government is committed to the Triple Lock, which means that in April 2025, the basic and new State pension will increase by the higher of the growth in average earnings, price increases or 2.5%.

The information requested is not available at a constituency level. Information on Employment Support Allowance (ESA) Work Capability Assessment (WCA) clearance times for initial claims is published at a national level on DWP Stat-Xplore. This can be accessed by selecting ‘Guest log in’ and choosing ‘Clearance Times for Initial Claims’ under the ESA WCA section.

We are currently unable to provide clearance times for Universal Credit (UC) WCA statistics, as these are being developed for future publication as explained in the UC Statistics release strategy.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates all health and social care services in England. The Commission ensures quality and safety across a range of sectors that deliver health and care to people in England.

The CQC carries out assessments of approximately 10% of registered primary dental services, to determine if they are compliant with regulations. However, they do not rate dental services in the same way they do for the other services they regulate. Data held by the CQC on the active dental locations in the Aldershot constituency that have been assessed is undergoing quality assurance, and is currently unavailable.

The Government will make sure the National Health Service has the staff it needs, to be there for all of us when we need it, and will get the staff to the places where patients and the NHS need them. This will not only benefit the Aldershot constituency, but the whole of the NHS in England.

Recruitment decisions do not sit with the Government but instead are the responsibility of the local employers, who are best placed to understand the diverse needs of their communities. They subsequently manage their own recruitment to ensure they have the right number of staff, with the right skill mix, to provide the safe and effective care that their patients need. Each trust has a retention midwife who focuses on retention and providing pastoral support to midwives as they consider their future options in and outside of the NHS.

The following table shows the number of people that were newly diagnosed with diabetes in the Aldershot constituency, in each of the calendar years from 2018 to 2022, broken down by diabetes type:

The average payments by the NHS Business Services Authority to community pharmacies in the Aldershot constituency were: £68,547.19 per pharmacy per month in 2021/22, or £822,566.32 per pharmacy for 12 months; and £77,398.58 per pharmacy per month in 2022/23, or £928,782.96 per pharmacy for 12 months.

We have committed to training thousands more general practitioners (GPs) across the country, as well as taking pressure off those currently working in the system. The inclusion of newly qualified GPs into the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme will also support the recruitment of GPs.

The NHS Frimley Integrated Care Board, which includes Aldershot, advises it is committed to supporting, developing, and retaining its workforce, and that it offers a full and varied training and development offer to clinical staff. This includes the national New GP Fellowship programme, which currently has 40 newly qualified GPs across the Frimley system, two of whom are from Aldershot. The scheme helps the transition into GP, post qualification. Other initiatives include mentoring and national Continuing Professional Development funding for primary care staff.

We know that patients are finding it harder than ever to see a general practitioner (GP), and we are committed to fixing this crisis in GPs to secure the long-term sustainability of the National Health Service. Aldershot sits within the NHS Frimley Integrated Care Board, where 84.8% of appointments were delivered within two weeks of booking, 2.1% higher than the national average.

The Government has committed to fixing the front door to the NHS by shifting the focus from hospitals and into the community. We know that if patients can’t get a GP appointment, they will end up in accident and emergency, which is worse for them, and more expensive for the taxpayer.

NHS England is working to address training bottlenecks, so the health service has enough staff for the future, and we have provided £82 million to fund the recruitment of over 1,000 newly qualified GPs, to increase capacity and reduce workloads.

We are pleased to announce that newly qualified GPs will be included in the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme as part of an initiative to address GP unemployment, with additional funding over 2024/25.

We know that patients are finding it increasingly difficult to see a general practitioner (GP). Patients cannot get through the front door of the National Health Service, so they aren’t getting the timely care they need.

We have pledged to guarantee a face-to-face appointment for all those who want one. We will make sure the future of general practice is sustainable by training thousands more GPs, ensuring increased capacity across the NHS to deliver this commitment and secure a future pipeline of GPs.

The National Health Service has been facing chronic workforce shortages for years and we have to be honest that bringing in the staff and investment the NHS needs will take time.

We are determined to fix our NHS and restore it to a service we are proud of. We are committed to training the staff we need to get patients seen on time.

The Government is committed to making sure the NHS has the staff it needs to be there for all of us when we need it and get staff in places where patients and the NHS need them and that will benefit not just Aldershot but the whole of the NHS in England.

Local employers are best placed to understand the diverse needs of their communities and subsequently manage their own recruitment to ensure they have the right number of staff, with the right skill mix, to provide the safe and effective care that their patients need.

Tackling waiting lists is a key part of our Health Mission and a top priority for the Government, as we get the National Health Service back on its feet. Equality of both access to care and outcomes will be at the heart of building an NHS that is fit for the future.

We have committed to achieving the NHS Constitutional standard that 92% of patients should wait no longer than 18 weeks from Referral to Treatment by the end of this Parliament. As a first step to achieving this, we will deliver an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week across the country, and will increase the number of computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and other tests, that are needed to reduce elective and cancer waits.

In Aldershot at a local level, the team will soon start trialling an animated video to promote breast screening. This has been developed in partnership with Imperial College London.

On a national level, NHS England has developed an improvement plan in collaboration with key stakeholders to support local and regional uptake, which includes: expanding access and reducing inequalities by increasing the use of evidence based and evaluated interventions, focusing on low uptake areas and groups; improved data and analytics by ensuring we have the availability of population level data to show insights into uptake and support services, to deliver targeted initiatives; IT developments to continue development of the breast screening IT systems, as part of the Digital Transformation of Screening programme, and by starting a programme of work to enable people to book appointments through the NHS App; contracting and service oversight, by strengthening contracting mechanisms and performance management to monitor impact and benefits; and communication, by ensuring the programme has appropriate inclusive and accessible communication mechanisms and materials.

Since 2010, the total number of residential care homes that have closed in the Aldershot constituency is 29.

From 1 April 2023, the responsibility for commissioning primary care, including dentistry, to meet the needs of the local population has been delegated to all integrated care boards (ICBs) across England. According to the 2024 GP patient survey results, 81% of people who tried to get a National Health Service dentist appointment in the last two years in Frimley ICB were successful compared to 76% in England. Of those who tried to get an appointment in the last two years, 87% of existing patients were successful compared to 35% of new patients.

This Government plans to tackle the challenges for patients trying to access National Health Service dental care with a rescue plan to provide 700,000 more urgent dental appointments and recruit new dentists to areas that need them most. To rebuild dentistry in the long term and increase access to NHS dental care, we will reform the dental contract, with a shift to focus on prevention and the retention of NHS dentists.

General practices are able to provide Directed Enhanced Services and Enhanced Services by opting in, and will receive payment for these services separately to global sum payments. As commissioners of primary care, integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning Local Enhanced Services, which are not agreed nationally and can vary in scope and funding to fit local needs.

Local authorities are best placed to understand and plan for the needs of their population, which is why under the Care Act 2014, local authorities are tasked with the duty to shape their care market to meet the diverse needs of all local people. In performing that duty, a local authority must have regard to the need to ensure that it is aware of current and likely future demand for such services, and to consider how providers might meet that demand.

The Market Sustainability and Improvement Fund includes grant conditions which require each local authority to submit an adult social care capacity plan. These were submitted to the Department in June 2024. The hon. Member's local authority, Aldershot, submitted their 2024/25 capacity plan, which is currently undergoing processing and quality assurance.

The Department is committed to working closely with NHS England to ensure that people with an eating disorder get the care and treatment they need, when they need it. The Department will focus on improving the performance of the existing waiting time standards for Children and Young Peoples’ Eating Disorder services including in Aldershot.

This will be supported by recruiting 8,500 additional mental health staff across children and adult mental health services, ensuring every young person has access to a specialist mental health professional at school, and setting up Young Futures hubs in every community, offering open access mental health services for young people.

People with mental health issues in Aldershot and across the country are not getting the support or care they deserve, which is why we will fix the broken system to ensure that mental health is given the same attention and focus as physical health, so that people can be confident in accessing high quality mental health support when they need it.

We will recruit an additional 8,500 mental health workers to reduce delays and provide faster treatment which will also help ease pressure on hospitals. By cutting mental health waiting lists and intervening earlier with more timely mental health support, we can get this country back to good health.

We know that patients are finding it harder than ever to see a general practitioner (GP) or National Health Service dentist, and we are committed to fixing the the crisis in primary care to secure the long-term sustainability of the NHS, and increase access to local services including those in the Aldershot constituency. Aldershot sits within the NHS Frimley Integrated Care Board (ICB), where the percentage of GP appointments delivered within two weeks of booking is 3.2% lower than the national average. Our annual statistics show that in 2023, only 40% of the adult population in the Frimley ICB were seen by an NHS dentist in the last two years, compared with 41% nationally.

Our plan to restore GPs will require both investment and reform. We have committed to training thousands more GPs, ending the 8:00am scramble for appointments by introducing a modern booking system, and trialing new neighborhood health centers to bring community health services together under one roof. Furthermore, the Government will also bring back the family doctor by incentivising GPs to see the same patient. The Government will also tackle the immediate dental crisis with a rescue plan to provide 700,000 more urgent dental appointments, and to recruit new dentists to the areas that need them most.