Cherilyn Mackrory

The Government is committed to finding efficient and effective ways of delivering public services. The Government announced steps to ensure efficient use of taxpayers’ money in the 2020 Spending Review, including strengthening the government’s approach to planning and delivery using the Public Value Framework, changing the way the government invests in places to level up economic opportunity and improving the management of the government’s capital portfolio.

In addition, the 2016 Local Government Finance Settlement offered Local Authorities the certainty of a four-year budget in return for publishing efficiency plans. This offer was overwhelmingly accepted by Councils, 97% of whom took up the offer in return for publishing efficiency plans.

Data on the number of hospitalised COVID-19 cases by vaccination status is not available in the format requested.

The data requested is not available in the format requested.

Public Health England’s technical briefing shows the latest data regarding hospitalisations by variant, in addition to data on those hospitalised with the Delta variant who are vaccinated with one or and both doses and those unvaccinated. This information is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201

We are expanding access to psychological therapies within specialist perinatal mental health services so that they include couple, co-parenting and family interventions. Partners of women accessing specialist perinatal mental health will also be offered evidence-based assessments for their mental health and signposting to support as required.

We have made no such estimate. Partners of women accessing care will be offered an evidence-based assessment and signposted to support, in line with the NHS Long Term Plan commitment for perinatal mental health services.

We do recognise the recruitment and retention of dentists, particularly in rural areas, is challenging.

I have met with the Chief Dental Officer this week and we are actively looking at how we can increase the number of dentists and improve services access and reach.

This includes our ambitions for the dental workforce in the interim NHS People Plan, which proposes more flexible innovative dental training pathways, and new skill-mix models to increase access to dentistry, particularly in rural areas.

If you want to meet with me please let my office know.

Progress against the HMCTS recovery plan published on 1 July is already well underway to reduce outstanding cases and to get our operating capacity as close as possible to pre-Covid levels.

We are investing record amounts, with £153m to improve court and tribunal buildings – the biggest single investment in court estate maintenance for more than 20 years. We’ve also opened 14 Nightingale Courts and over 240 jury courtrooms, while Magistrates’ Courts have been completing more cases than they are receiving.

We’ve piloted Covid Operating hours at the Crown Court in Liverpool and several other crown courts. I’m also pleased the number of hearings across the civil, family and tribunal jurisdictions is also increasing.

The tourism and hospitality sectors have benefited from UK-wide Government financial support. This includes the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, which has been extended for a further one month until December.

In addition, a VAT cut to 5% has been extended for both sectors.

While the Government will take every opportunity to promote Northern Ireland, tourism is the responsibility of the NI Executive, to whom the Government has provided £2.4bn to respond to the pandemic, including supporting those sectors most affected.