Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding his Department has allocated to healthy start welfare foods payments in each year since 2012-13.

The Healthy Start and Nursery Milk schemes are demand led statutory schemes. This means that the Department must meet expenditure arising from legitimate claims made in line with the legislation. Funding is allocated to the schemes to meet the actual demand, rising or falling in line with the overall uptake for each scheme, and the Government works to ensure that eligible people are aware of the schemes and how they can benefit from them.

The funding allocated to the schemes is accounted for through a single cost centre with total costs is shown in the following table. A split by individual scheme is not available in the format requested.

Audited spend data for the 2018-19 financial year is not yet available.