Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 28 January 2019 to Question 213341, for what reasons his Department has no plans to reinstate the UK-wide Infant Feeding Survey.

The Infant Feeding Survey can only provide information at national level because of the sample size. It does not have sufficient individual records to provide data at a local level.

Since 2015 Public Health England has published experimental statistics on breastfeeding prevalence at six to eight weeks. These derive from record level administrative data collected on all children, which is collated at a local level and is statistically significant. This makes it possible to benchmark the outcomes for local areas against the national average and other areas of the country.

These data are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/breastfeeding-statistics