Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will launch a public consultation before introducing legislation to abolish the statutory functions of local Healthwatch.

Although there are no plans to carry out a direct public consultation on the abolition of local Healthwatch arrangements. Dr Dash’s report on patient safety across the health and care landscape was published in July 2025 and made nine recommendations which the Government have accepted in full. Dr Dash’s findings and recommendations have also fed into the 10-Year Health Plan which itself was devised on the basis of the widest ever public consultation on the future of the National Health Service.

Dr Dash’s review recommends bringing together the work of local Healthwatch organisations with the engagement functions of integrated care boards and providers to ensure patient and wider community input into the planning and design of services.

These changes will improve quality, including safety, by making it clear where responsibility and accountability sit at all levels of the system. The changes will make it easier for staff, patients and service users to feed directly into the system to improve quality of care. We believe after these changes that patients and users will have a stronger voice and one that is more easily heard inside the system.