Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent meetings he has had with local authority leaders to discuss improved co-operation between the NHS and social services.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
All external meetings that Ministers have attended are published as part of the Department’s quarterly transparency returns. The returns covering 2017 and 2018 could be found in the GOV.UK website at the following link:
The return covering April to June 2018 has not yet been published but is expected to be soon.
The Ministers in the Department regularly meet with representatives of local authorities including the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services – during these meetings a range of topics are discussed, including integration of health and social care.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average time was for a final decision on an asylum application in each of the last five years.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
Information regarding Asylum data is published as part of the Government’s Transparency agenda the latest release of which can be found at can be found at
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asylum-transparency-data-august-2018
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when his Department plans to publish its response to the consultation on the draft Animal Welfare (Sentencing and Recognition of Sentience) Bill which closed on 31 Jan 2018.
Answered by George Eustice
The summary of consultation responses on the draft Animal Welfare (Sentencing and Recognition of Sentience) Bill, including the Government's next steps, was published on 7 August 2018 at the following link:
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many appeals have been made on the outcome of work capability assessments in each of the last five years; and what proportion of those appeals were successful.
Answered by Sarah Newton
Information on appeal outcomes for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) Fit for Work decisions in initial assessment are provided in Table 3 in the statistical release “ESA: outcomes of Work Capability Assessments including mandatory reconsiderations and appeals: June 2018”, available here:
Table 17 of the same publication provides experimental cohort statistics for initial and repeat ESA Work Capability Assessments (WCA) assessments including the number of appeals completed and their outcome.
Statistics on Universal Credit (UC) WCA appeals are not available.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has emergency plans in place to assist NHS hospitals in the event of a severe influenza outbreak this year.
Answered by Steve Barclay - Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
As part of winter resilience planning, all National Health Service trusts have plans in place to cope with capacity and demand in the event of flu emergencies. NHS winter plans for 2018-19 were published by NHS England and NHS Improvement on 7 September 2018. These include plans to drive up levels of vaccination among NHS frontline staff to help protect patients and reduce the impact of flu ahead of the winter months.
Influenza vaccination remains the best protection against flu, and should be offered to everyone over the age of 65 years, those who are at particular risk of flu, and pregnant women, at the earliest opportunity. Influenza vaccination should also be offered to all frontline healthcare workers through their occupational health teams. This year all children between 2-9 years will be offered the nasal spray vaccine to help protect them and their families against influenza.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much money his Department has spent on promoting NHS recruitment opportunities in each of the last five years.
Answered by Steve Barclay - Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The information requested is shown in the following table.
Financial year | Amount spent |
2014/15 | £0 |
2015/16 | £0 |
2016/17 | £0 |
2017/18 | £0 |
2018/19 | £2 million – the Department’s contribution to a national National Health Service recruitment campaign |
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what changes have been made to NHS (a) IT systems and (b) cyber security since the cyber attack in May 2017.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The National Health Service is putting in place robust measures to protect IT systems against cyber-attacks. Since May 2017 the Government has invested £60 million to support NHS providers to improve their security position, with a further £150 million pledged up until 2021 to improve the NHS’s resilience against attacks.
The Department published its progress report in February 2018 entitled ‘Securing cyber resilience in health and care: progress update’. The report is available at the following link:
Key actions taken since February 2018 include:
- signing a Windows 10 licensing agreement with Microsoft which will allow local NHS organisations to save money, reduce potential vulnerabilities and help increase cyber resilience;
- enhancing the capability of the Cyber Security Operations Centre boosting the national capability to prevent, detect and respond to cyber-attacks through the procurement of IBM as a specialist partner;
- launching the Data Security and Protection Toolkit which provides an accessible dashboard enabling trusts to track their progress in meeting the 10 Data Security Standards;
- agreeing plans to implement the recommendations of the Chief Information Officer for Health and Care’s review of the May 2017 WannaCry attack;
- provided specialist face to face security training (System Security Certified Practitioner - SSCP) for over 100 staff; and
- in May 2018 the Network and Information Security Regulations came into force which requires operators of essential services (including some NHS healthcare providers) to put appropriate security measures in place and to report significant incidents that occur.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has any targets to increase the availability of mental health care training opportunities.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The Government asked Health Education England (HEE) to work across all health bodies to develop a Mental Health Workforce plan, which was published in July 2017. ‘Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England’ sets out concrete steps to deliver 21,000 new posts (professional and allied) across the mental health system, with the expectation that 19,000 of these places will be filled by staff employed directly by the National Health Service.
The document is available at the following link:
https://hee.nhs.uk/our-work/mental-health
Health Education England will take this plan into account as it continues to commission mental health care training for professions such as clinical psychology, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) professionals, general psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.
The expansion target for adult IAPT professionals is 4,500 between 2016 and 2021. For children and young people’s IAPT professionals, HEE will recruit and train 1,700 new professionals and train 3,400 existing NHS staff between 2016 and 2021.
Across the NHS, there will be an extra 10,000 training places for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals by 2020.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, if he will make it his policy to restore compensation for war widows who remarried between 1973 and 2005.
Answered by Tobias Ellwood
We recognise the unique commitment that Service families make to our country and remain sympathetic to the circumstances of this group of widows.
I can advise that Ministry of Defence officials continue to consider potential options given the financial and legal considerations faced by the Department. This work is on-going and any recommendations will require the agreement of other Government Departments.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate her Department has made of the number of people participating in a workplace pension scheme in Bolton North East constituency.
Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
Since 2012 in Bolton North East constituency, approximately 13,000 eligible jobholders have been automatically enrolled.
Automatic enrolment is a great success story. Over 9.8 million employees have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension, and more than 1.3 million employers have met their duties as at the end of July 2018.
Nationally in 2012, the percentage of eligible private sector workers participating in a workplace pension hit a low of 42 per cent. This figure has now risen to 81 per cent. This marks a 39 percentage point increase in pension participation of this group since the introduction of Automatic Enrolment.
Young people have embraced pension saving, with 77 per cent of eligible 22 to 29 year olds working in the private sector now enrolled in a workplace pension. For context, only 24 per cent of this group were enrolled into a workplace pension in 2012, before the introduction of Automatic Enrolment. And the proportion of people earning between £10,000 and £20,000 participating in a workplace pension has grown dramatically, from a low of under 20 per cent in 2012 to over 70 per cent today.