Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to respond to the Lancet Standing Commission report entitled Unacceptable failures: the final report of the Lancet Commission into liver disease in the UK, published in November 2019.

NHS England’s Hepatobiliary Clinical Reference Group has already taken action in response to the Lancet Commission report into liver disease in the United Kingdom, such as starting work on the development of liver networks in England.

More broadly, the Department is also taking action regarding key liver disease risk factors such as excessive alcohol consumption and obesity, and the Prevention Green Paper, ‘Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s’, recognises the need for a range of actions to address causes of preventable ill health.