Asked by: Caroline Johnson (Conservative - Sleaford and North Hykeham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the cost to public purse of the creation and enactment of transfer schemes in connection with the abolition of the NHS England.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Any costs associated with creating and implementing transfer schemes will form part of the overall costs of the DHSC-NHSE Transformation Programme.
Further details on expenditure related to the closure of NHS England will be reported in our Annual Accounts in the normal way.
The Government expects the wider reforms, including the integration of NHS England into the Department, to deliver savings of over £1 billion a year by the end of this Parliament.
Asked by: Caroline Johnson (Conservative - Sleaford and North Hykeham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information his Department holds on the estimated costs of making provisions for transfer schemes of connection with the abolition of the NHS England.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Any costs associated with creating and implementing transfer schemes will form part of the overall costs of the DHSC-NHSE Transformation Programme.
Further details on expenditure related to the closure of NHS England will be reported in our Annual Accounts in the normal way.
The Government expects the wider reforms, including the integration of NHS England into the Department, to deliver savings of over £1 billion a year by the end of this Parliament.
Asked by: Lee Pitcher (Labour - Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance his Department provides to NHS and local authority professionals on responsibility for commissioning specialist night-time safety equipment for children with complex developmental disabilities.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The Children and Families Act 2014 requires that education, health, and social care services must work together to meet the needs of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning services to meet the health needs of their local population, and responsibility for providing equipment to disabled people typically falls to the National Health Service and local authorities (LAs).
We expect ICBs to follow guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). In 2022, NICE published guidance on Disabled children and young people up to 25 with severe complex needs, which is available at the following link:
This guidance encourages education, health, and social care services to work together and provide more coordinated support to children and young people.
In May 2023, NHS England issued statutory guidance setting out the requirement for ICBs to have an executive lead for SEND, who will lead on supporting the chief executive and the board to ensure the ICB performs its functions effectively in the interests of children and young people with SEND.
LAs in England have a statutory duty under various legislations, including the Care Act 2014, and the Children and Families Act 2014, to make arrangements for the provision of disability aids and community equipment, and to meet the assessed eligible needs of individuals who are resident in their area. Types of support include equipment to enable people to live more independently, such as grab rails, walking aids, and wheelchairs for short-term use.
Some LAs deliver this themselves but a significant number have external contracts for integrated community equipment services. Responsibility for managing the market for these services, including commissioning and oversight of delivery, rests with LAs.
Asked by: Luke Evans (Conservative - Hinckley and Bosworth)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether patients with recognised palliative or end-of-life care needs are subject to specific identification or prioritisation processes within accident and emergency departments.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Secretary of State for Wales
Patients attending an emergency department are assessed on arrival by an appropriately trained clinician or healthcare professional using established clinical triage processes. Triage is intended to identify patients who require the most urgent assessment and treatment, with priority determined by clinical need and the severity of the patient's condition rather than by any single diagnosis or patient group.
Where patients have recognised palliative or end-of-life care needs, clinicians will take account of the patient's presenting condition, any relevant advance care plans or documented care preferences, and exercise clinical judgement when determining the most appropriate course of treatment or onward care.
There is no national urgent and emergency care policy that provides a separate triage category or automatic prioritisation process solely on the basis that a patient is identified as having palliative care or end-of-life care needs.
The Single Patient Record will support our wider integration work providing a single trusted source of patient information, including care plans, that will be available to providers of health and care enabling them to offer more seamless co-ordinated care across the range of health and care services. Our ambition is that, from 2028, patients in England will be able to view their Single Patient Record via the NHS App, starting with maternity and frailty.
We are developing a Modern Service Framework (MSF) for Palliative Care and End-of-life care. The MSF will provide a clinically led, evidence-based framework to support sustained improvement in patient and carer outcomes, including reducing both inequality and unwarranted variation. The MSF will provide the framework against which palliative care and end-of-life care will be improved across all settings, including hospital and community.
The MSF will build on the ambitions set out in the Neighbourhood Health Framework to improve the identification of people approaching the end of life by 10% and reduce non elective admissions and hospital bed days for people at the end of life by 10% by March 2029. We recognise that care can be planned more proactively, and unwanted emergency admissions avoided, through good palliative care in the community.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the representation of people with lived experience among respondents to the call for evidence for the Mental Health Strategy.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The views of people who have firsthand experience of mental ill-health and mental health services must be at the heart of our work.
The Call for Evidence to inform the strategy closed on 10 July. It invited practical examples and evidence on how to implement improvements to mental health care and outcomes. We expect responses to be largely from service providers, clinicians, academics, and advocacy groups, but everyone was welcomed to submit evidence to the call for evidence. The responses are currently being analysed.
Alongside the Call for Evidence responses, we are conducting additional engagement with people with lived experience. This includes a series of focus group discussions with children, young people, and adults which are being run in partnership with key voluntary sector partners to test the scope and aims of the strategy.
We are exploring options to conduct further engagement sessions on key policy topics with people with lived experience. Examples of topics we might conduct bespoke engagement on include the integration of neurodevelopmental conditions within the strategy, which we know is a really important issue to get right.
The strategy is also being shaped by the insights that people with lived experience have shared with us already through the extensive 10-Year Health Plan engagement exercises and, more recently, lived experience input into the independent review into the prevalence and support for mental health, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism, the modern service frameworks, and the new Mental Health Act.
Asked by: Jess Brown-Fuller (Liberal Democrat - Chichester)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to review the quality and effectiveness of supported living services to ensure providers deliver the level of care for which they are commissioned.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Secretary of State for Wales
The Government requires that the care and support provided within all supported living settings meets the highest standards. The Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 was enacted to ensure that all providers deliver safe, good quality support in good quality accommodation. The 2023 act will introduce a licensing regime for all supported housing in England. Providers will need to apply for a licence for their supported living schemes in each local authority, pass a fit and proper person test, and meet several other conditions, including complying with the National Supported Housing Standards and standards on staff and safeguarding. The Government will consult on draft regulations later this year.
More broadly, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) is assessing how local authorities in England are meeting the full range of their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act 2014. This includes assessment on safeguarding under theme 3 of the local authority assessment framework, as well as market capacity and timeliness of service provision, including supported living services, under the Care provision, integration and continuity Quality Statement. Further information on theme 3 of the local authority assessment framework and the Care provision, integration and continuity Quality Statement is available, respectively, at the following two links:
https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-regulation/local-authorities/assessment-framework/theme3
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of housing asylum seekers in military accommodation on social cohesion and community integration.
Answered by Alex Norris - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
The Home Office regularly works in collaboration with local authorities and other partners including the police to ensure that accommodation sites are successfully managed and the impact upon the local community is minimised. This includes a comprehensive and ongoing approach to identifying and managing any public protection or safeguarding risks associated with individuals.
Community cohesion is fully considered in site selection. Military sites allow for dedicated on-site services, improved safeguarding, and greater oversight - reducing demand on local resources such as healthcare, reducing disruption to local communities and ensuring public safety.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Whizz Kidz Youth Board's report entitled Mobility Matters: A Youth Perspective on NHS Wheelchair Services, published on 26 June 2026, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of arrangements for commissioning paediatric wheelchair services.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services, based on the needs of their local population. This includes wheelchairs for adults and children. NHS England supports ICBs to commission effective, efficient, and personalised wheelchair services and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment.
This includes publishing a Wheelchair Quality Framework on 9 April 2025, which sets out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs. The framework is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/wheelchair-quality-framework/
NHS England’s wheelchair data collection reports on the proportion of adults and children whose episode of care was closed in the reporting period and prescribed equipment was delivered within 18 weeks or less. In Quarter four, 2025/26, the proportion of patients whose episode of care was closed in the reporting period and whose prescribed wheelchair was delivered within 18 weeks or less was: 79.1% for children, up from 79% since Quarter three; and 81.5% for adults, down from 83.1% since Quarter three.
The Medium-Term Planning Framework sets a requirement for all providers and ICBs to actively manage long waits for community health services, reducing the proportion of all waits over 18 weeks. This will be monitored via the National Health Service’s usual regional and national assurance processes. The Community Health Services Situation Report will be used to monitor ICB performance against waiting time targets in 2026/27. These targets will guide systems to reduce the longest waits.
We expect ICBs to follow guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). In 2022 NICE published the guidance Disabled children and young people up to 25 with severe complex needs: integrated service delivery and organisation across health, social care and education, which is available at the following link:
Asked by: Lee Dillon (Liberal Democrat - Newbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of whether the governance framework for the NHS Federated Data Platform reflects the data access arrangements currently in operation.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care better to improve outcomes for patients.
The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres, partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on the benefits realised from the NHS FDP, which is available at the following link:
To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, including the Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
The NHS FDP is underpinned by the NHS FDP Information Governance Framework which sets out the roles, responsibilities, and controls governing how data is accessed and used.
Access to data within the platform is subject to role-based and purpose-based access controls and is governed through a comprehensive set of information governance documentation, including Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA), data sharing agreements, and privacy notices.
Each product and use case within the platform is required to undergo appropriate information governance assessment and approval processes prior to deployment, with oversight provided through established governance arrangements, including the Federated Data Platform Data Governance Group.
NHS England has undertaken an urgent review of the current DPIA for the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT), as the description of access to the directly identifiable layer within NDIT could be interpreted as indicating that non-NHS England staff have no access. This will be revised to make clear that some supplier staff, appropriately controlled, have access to patient data.
Asked by: Lee Dillon (Liberal Democrat - Newbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to commission an updated Data Protection Impact Assessment for the NHS Federated Data Platform.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care better to improve outcomes for patients.
The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres, partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on the benefits realised from the NHS FDP, which is available at the following link:
To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, including the Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
The NHS FDP is underpinned by the NHS FDP Information Governance Framework which sets out the roles, responsibilities, and controls governing how data is accessed and used.
Access to data within the platform is subject to role-based and purpose-based access controls and is governed through a comprehensive set of information governance documentation, including Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA), data sharing agreements, and privacy notices.
Each product and use case within the platform is required to undergo appropriate information governance assessment and approval processes prior to deployment, with oversight provided through established governance arrangements, including the Federated Data Platform Data Governance Group.
NHS England has undertaken an urgent review of the current DPIA for the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT), as the description of access to the directly identifiable layer within NDIT could be interpreted as indicating that non-NHS England staff have no access. This will be revised to make clear that some supplier staff, appropriately controlled, have access to patient data.