Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what minimum qualifications his Department expects of staff delivering the mandated health visitor reviews; and what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of replacing community staff nurses with unregistered practitioners on levels of care.

The healthy child programme provides a universal public health offer for children and families, with local authorities commissioning programme services, including health visiting and school nursing, alongside the targeted Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme. Funding for these services is provided through the Public Health Grant. Local authorities are required to offer five mandated health and development reviews to all eligible families, from pregnancy to age five, delivered through health visiting services. There are no equivalent mandated review requirements for school nursing or the FNP.

The Department has recently refreshed its guidance for local authorities commissioning healthy child programme services. The new guidance, published in February 2026, sets out a clear vision for more joined-up service delivery, encouraging collaboration between all partners involved in child health with the aim of promoting consistency and raising standards across England. It emphasises a universal offer for all families, plus additional targeted or specialist support provided according to need. The FNP is a targeted offer.

The new guidance also emphasises that continuity of care is fundamental to safe, high-quality support, enabling professionals to build relationships with families and identify emerging needs or risks at the earliest opportunity. It highlights the importance of skilled professional judgement, clinical assessment and relational practice by health visitors, but supports the appropriate use of skill-mix teams to maximise the impact of the clinical workforce. We also published the first workforce dataset for health visiting and school nursing in September 2026, to help the department and local authorities monitor services.