Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to reduce the backlog of unreviewed cases in the LeDer process.

Our assessment is that over the past 12 months, the Learning Disability Mortality Review (LeDeR) programme has made good progress in completing reviews, providing the largest body of evidence of deaths of people with a learning disability at an individual level anywhere in the world and using that evidence to turn learning into action to drive improvements in healthcare.

By December 2019, the latest date for which information is available, 3,195 reviews had been completed. There are also a further 1,923 reviews currently in progress. The total number of deaths notified to the Programme at December 2019 was 7,145 of which 3,060 had been notified in the last 12 months.

Unallocated reviews do not necessarily equate to a backlog as not all will have exceeded the standard for completion, which is within six months of a death being notified to the Programme. As a proportion of the total number of notifications to the Programme, unallocated reviews have reduced from 39% in November 2018 to 28% in December 2019. NHS England expect that, by the end of 2020, every clinical commissioning group (CCG) will be in a position to conclude all reviews within six months where it is appropriate to do so.

In May 2019, NHS England announced an additional £5 million investment in 2019/20 to address the backlog of unreviewed cases and increase the pace in which cases are allocated and reviewed in timely way. Monies have been allocated to CCGs and to the Commissioning Support Unit and is being invested in developing a dedicated workforce to carry out reviews and to develop systems and processes to embed quality improvement activity across the health and social care system. More than 2,000 experts have now been trained to undertake reviews.