Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment his Department has made of the likely effects of the ageing population on the costs of treating sight loss and eye health issues.

The Department has made no recent estimate of the number of people with sight loss, the likely number who will have sight loss in the future, or of the costs in treating sight loss and eye health issues.

Information on the number of patients who are blind or have sight loss is not collected centrally. However information is available on the number of people who are registered by local authorities as blind or partially sighted. At March 2014, the number of people on the register of blind people was 143,000 and on the register of partially sighted people 147,700.

Registration as blind or partially sighted is voluntary so the numbers registered are likely to be an underestimate of the total number of people living with sight loss. Research funded by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, published in 2009¹, estimated there were almost 2 million people in the United Kingdom living with sight loss and that this number would double to 4 million by 2050.

Information is collected centrally and published on NHS expenditure on `problems of vision’ across both primary and secondary care. In the latest year for which data has been published² for both primary and secondary care, 2012/13, primary care trust expenditure was £2.3 billion. The Department expects NHS England to commission services for eye health to meet any increased demand, as it would in any other area of healthcare. The ‘Five Year Forward View’³ sets out the vision for how services may be organised going forward.

¹ http://www.rnib.org.uk/sites/default/files/FSUK_Report.pdf

² http://www.england.nhs.uk/resources/resources-for-ccgs/prog-budgeting/

³ http://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5yfv-web.pdf