Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his policies of the March 2019 editorial in Archives of Disease in Childhood entitled Charging undocumented migrant children for NHS healthcare: implications for child health.

The Department has no plans to make an assessment of the policy implications of the March 2019 editorial in Archives of Disease in Childhood entitled ‘Charging undocumented migrant children for NHS healthcare: implications for child health’.

The National Health Service is a residency-based healthcare system, with a requirement to be ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom in order to access NHS-funded healthcare. Providers of relevant NHS services are required to make and recover charges from overseas visitors where relevant services have been provided to them and no exemption applies.

Asylum seekers, refugees and children looked after by a local authority are all exempt from charging, as are victims, and suspected victims, of modern slavery and their children. Children will never themselves be expected to demonstrate their eligibility to free NHS healthcare. The parent or guardian of the child should expect to provide evidence that they and the child are ordinarily resident in the UK, or otherwise that an exemption category applies to the child, which usually stems from an exemption that the parent has. Where a non-resident child is being treated their parent or guardian will be liable to pay for their NHS care where no exemption applies.