Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to improve accountability for delivering mandated health visiting checks in response to evidence from the Children’s Commissioner's Best Beginnings in the Early Years report that indicated up to 65 per cent of children were not receiving the two and a half year old check in some local areas.

Since publication of the Children’s Commissioner’s report ‘Best beginnings in the Early Years’, Public Health England (PHE) has published updated guidance for mandated health visits to support local decision-making on service commissioning and provision. The guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/healthy-child-programme-0-to-19-health-visitor-and-school-nurse-commissioning

To monitor implementation, PHE also continues to collect and publishes quarterly data on health visiting service metrics, which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/health-visitor-service-delivery-metrics-2019-to-2020