Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of introducing standardised plain packaging for vaping products on rates of youth vaping.
Answered by Sharon Hodgson
Our advice is clear, while vaping is less harmful than smoking and can be an effective smoking quit aid for adult smokers, it is not risk free and children and non-smokers should never vape.
Data from Action on Smoking and Health from 2026 shows that over one million 11 to 17-year-olds have tried vaping. Evidence suggests that packaging, product design, and flavours can increase the appeal of vaping products to children and young people. To address this, the Government launched a United Kingdom wide consultation on 10 July on proposals to reduce the appeal of tobacco, vaping, and nicotine products, including proposals to introduce plain, white packaging for vaping and nicotine products.
Evidence from University College London and Kings College London found that plain vape packaging reduced the appeal of vapes to young people without putting off adults who smoke. The proportion of young people who thought their friends would want to try a vape fell from approximately half, or 53%, with branded packaging to about a third, or 38%, with plain packaging, and to around a quarter, or 27%, when flavour descriptions were also limited.
These proposals are intended to reduce the appeal of vaping products to children and young people and help reduce youth vaping. The Government has assessed the potential impact of these policies on the number of people vaping in the consultation-stage impact assessment. The Government will carefully consider all consultation responses before making any final policy decisions.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an estimate of the annual cost to her Department of preparing ministers to respond to Westminster Hall Debates.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Secretary of State for Wales
It is not possible to provide an exact cost for preparing Ministers to respond to Westminster Hall Debates. There will be differences in the costs of Civil Service, Special Adviser and Ministerial time depending on the policy matter and length of the debate. Debates can also be cross-cutting and require resources from multiple departments or engage departmental bodies.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the representation of people with lived experience among respondents to the call for evidence for the Mental Health Strategy.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The views of people who have firsthand experience of mental ill-health and mental health services must be at the heart of our work.
The Call for Evidence to inform the strategy closed on 10 July. It invited practical examples and evidence on how to implement improvements to mental health care and outcomes. We expect responses to be largely from service providers, clinicians, academics, and advocacy groups, but everyone was welcomed to submit evidence to the call for evidence. The responses are currently being analysed.
Alongside the Call for Evidence responses, we are conducting additional engagement with people with lived experience. This includes a series of focus group discussions with children, young people, and adults which are being run in partnership with key voluntary sector partners to test the scope and aims of the strategy.
We are exploring options to conduct further engagement sessions on key policy topics with people with lived experience. Examples of topics we might conduct bespoke engagement on include the integration of neurodevelopmental conditions within the strategy, which we know is a really important issue to get right.
The strategy is also being shaped by the insights that people with lived experience have shared with us already through the extensive 10-Year Health Plan engagement exercises and, more recently, lived experience input into the independent review into the prevalence and support for mental health, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism, the modern service frameworks, and the new Mental Health Act.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has made an assessment of the capacity of children under the age of 16 to provide informed assent to participation in the PATHWAYS clinical trial.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The consideration of consent and assent proposals within clinical trials rightly forms part of the independent scientific and regulatory review process. This trial has been designed with the input of expert clinicians, children, and families, and has benefited from independent peer review, and been subject to formal review and approval via both the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the Health Research Authority.
PATHWAYS is a clinical trial of an investigational medicinal product, so under-16 year olds cannot legally give the trial consent on their own. Informed consent must come from a parent or person with parental responsibility, although the young person’s assent and understanding are essential. This will include the young person needing to be able to explain in their own words to the clinician what the risks are and that they understand those risks. The research protocol also requires a formal review of the young person’s understanding and wish to continue once they reach 16 years old.
Individuals considering entry into the trial will be subject to strict eligibility criteria. These include that children considering assent will have had a gender incongruence diagnosis for a minimum of two years, have been holistically assessed and will have accessed tailored psychosocial support via specialist National Health Service gender services, and will have been deemed clinically appropriate, within the context of the study, by both their NHS clinical team and the National Multi-Disciplinary Team of professional experts.
Maintaining the safety and wellbeing of children and young people has always been the Government’s priority for this trial, and always will be.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the value of the 10 Year Capital Plan is over its lifetime; and how much funding is (a) new and (b) previously announced.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government has already committed to the largest ever health capital budget, with annual funding rising to £15 billion by 2029 to 2030. In addition, the Government’s 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy committed to unprecedented long-term certainty beyond this for estates maintenance funding, with a 10 year settlement to 2035 worth £65 billion.
The 10 Year Capital Plan for Health and Social Care, published on Wednesday 8 July, does not announce further spending beyond the significant levels of investment already announced. Instead, it brings together the Government’s existing health capital commitments into a single framework aligned with the 10-Year Health Plan. It sets out how record Government investment will support the three shifts, from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention, while rebuilding and modernising the National Health Service over the next decade.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the potential impact of the Capital Plan on the eradication of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete from the NHS estate.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The 10 Year Capital Plan confirms that we will continue providing targeted support to National Health Service trusts affected by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), with the aim of eradicating RAAC from the NHS estate by 2035. Over the next four years, we will eradicate RAAC from 22 hospitals and progress works at the remaining hospital sites to protect patients, staff, and the public, backed by £1.6 billion of investment. This includes targeted safety mitigations to keep the seven hospitals that are constructed wholly or primarily made from RAAC safe to operate until completion of their rebuilds as part of Wave 1 of the New Hospital Programme.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how the £4.4 billion capital investment in digital infrastructure will be allocated by programme.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
£4.5 billion of technology, digital, and data capital investment has been allocated to programmes and live services over the four-year 2025 Spending Review period from 2026/27 to 2029/30. The following table shows a breakdown of this spend by programme or service:
Programme/services | Spend (millions) |
Establishing Operational Excellence | £65 |
Federated Data Platform | £204 |
Transforming the Patient Experience | £1,015 |
Transforming and Connecting Care | £440 |
Frontline Productivity | £801 |
Core Infrastructure | £337 |
One Digital | £2 |
Cyber Improvement | £36 |
Health Data Research Service | £169 |
Digital Diagnostics Capability | £339 |
Live Services | £1,059 |
Total | £4,467 |
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding each NHS trust will receive through the Estates Safety Fund over the next nine years.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
As reiterated in our 10 Year Capital Plan, published on 8 July 2026, the Estates Safety Fund will be provided with £6.75 billion over the next nine years to tackle the poorest-quality National Health Service estate and ensure safe environments for healthcare delivery. This funding will be used both to address urgent operational risks and to deliver a number of larger strategic schemes, delivering significant reductions in critical infrastructure risk (CIR) and backlog maintenance.
To enable this, estates safety allocations are being made at a regional level, based on reported levels of CIR across the country and estates related incidents.
NHS regions working with integrated care boards and NHS trusts are prioritising this funding between their organisations to deliver maximum safety benefits. Allocation processes are ongoing, and as such, funding allocations for individual NHS trusts are not yet confirmed.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding each NHS trust will receive through the Estates Safety Fund over the next nine years.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
As reiterated in our 10 Year Capital Plan, published on 8 July 2026, the Estates Safety Fund will be provided with £6.75 billion over the next nine years to tackle the poorest-quality National Health Service estate and ensure safe environments for healthcare delivery. This funding will be used both to address urgent operational risks and to deliver a number of larger strategic schemes, delivering significant reductions in critical infrastructure risk (CIR) and backlog maintenance.
To enable this, estates safety allocations are being made at a regional level, based on reported levels of CIR across the country and estates related incidents.
NHS regions working with integrated care boards and NHS trusts are prioritising this funding between their organisations to deliver maximum safety benefits. Allocation processes are ongoing, and as such, funding allocations for individual NHS trusts are not yet confirmed.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS buildings classified as being in poor or very poor condition are expected to be replaced or comprehensively refurbished by 2035.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
National Health Service trusts are responsible for managing their estates and maintaining their facilities within their agreed budgets. This includes refurbishing and replacing buildings in poor or very poor condition.
As set out in the Government’s 10 Year Capital Plan for Health and 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy, we are investing £65 billion in the day-to-day maintenance and repair of the NHS estate over the next decade. As part of this, NHS trusts will receive £15 billion in operational capital across 2026/27 to 2029/30, which they can assign to their local priorities, including the repair and renewal of their facilities and equipment.
The Estates Safety Fund will continue, investing £6.75 billion over the next nine years to tackle the poorest-quality NHS estate. NHS regions working with integrated care boards and NHS trusts are prioritising this funding between their organisations to deliver maximum safety benefits. Allocation processes are ongoing, and as such, the total number of planned replacement and refurbishment schemes is not yet confirmed.