Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in how many instances his Department has put mitigations for conflict of interest in place for (a) Ministers and (b) senior officials each year since 1 June 2024.
Answered by James Frith - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
There are established processes in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers and senior civil servants, which ensure that steps are taken to avoid a conflict of interest or manage the perception of a conflict.
Information about the ministers’ interests process can be found in the Ministerial Code, and the List of Ministers’ Interests is published quarterly, with further information on both available, respectively, at the following two links:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ministerial-code/ministerial-code
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-ministers-interests
Data on the specific number of individual mitigation measures put in place is held within confidential personnel records and localised casework logs. To extract and aggregate a precise historical count of individual mitigations across all senior officials since 1 June 2024 could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Lloyd Hatton (Labour - South Dorset)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to increase the number of GP services in South Dorset constituency.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Secretary of State for Wales
We promised to improve access to GPs, and that’s exactly what we are doing. This year we have invested an additional £601m in the GP contract and we’ve delivered 8 million more appointments than last year, with South Dorset seeing an increase of 27,000. We have 2,000 more fully-qualified GPs than in July 2024, which includes 12 extra GPs in Dorset ICB, an increase of 3% and from this year we're enabling PCNs to recruit a broader range of roles to improve access to services. At a local level, NHS Dorset ICB has the responsibility for commissioning services to meet the needs of my honourable friend’s constituency.