Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to increase funding for health and care elements of specialist college provision to reduce the pressure on the high needs budget.

Local authorities will receive an increase of £1 billion in 2022/23, bringing the overall high needs budget to £9.1 billion. This increase takes into account of the range of pressures on local authorities’ high needs budgets, including the number of children and young people with education, health and care plans. This can enable some increase to the high needs funding passed on to specialist colleges, where that is required to meet the cost pressures faced by those colleges.