Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has made an assessment of the adequacy of levels of support for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Occupational health as advisory support has a broad remit. It plays an important role in supporting employers to maintain and promote employee health and wellbeing through assessments of fitness for work, advice about reasonable adjustments, work ability or return to work plans, and signposting to treatment for specific conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

Access to Work is a demand-led, personalised discretionary grant that supports the recruitment and retention of disabled people in sustainable paid employment. The tailored nature of the scheme allows customers to receive the appropriate grant and support based on their specific health and disability-related needs, including ME/CFS. Access to Work grants do not replace an employer’s duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments.

The goal is to open up opportunities to good work and to support a healthier, more productive and inclusive nation, by helping more disabled people and people with health conditions like ME/CFS to get appropriate work, get on in that work, and to return to work as quickly as possible if they leave it. This supports the Government’s priority of tackling economic inactivity, as set out in the Get Britain Working White Paper.

NHS England recently completed a ME/CFS stocktake, aimed at providing a nationwide overview of service delivery in commissioning and contracting, assessing access, activity, and outcomes. The findings confirmed the widely recognised challenges of significant variation in care delivery across England and a lack of comprehensive activity data.

We aim to publish our ME/CFS final delivery plan by the end of June 2025. The plan will focus on boosting research, improving attitudes and education, and bettering the lives of people with this debilitating disease. The responses to the interim delivery plan consultation, along with continued close engagement with other parts of the Government, the National Health Service, and external stakeholders, will inform the development of the final ME/CFS delivery plan.