Asked by: Helen Morgan (Liberal Democrat - North Shropshire)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the contribution of Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocates (MNISAs).
Answered by Alison McGovern - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
An independent evaluation of the Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocates pilot delivered across 16 integrated care boards was conducted from October 2024 to June 2025 by the National Institute for Health and Care Research’s Rapid Service Evaluation Team. It found clear value, including ensuring that families’ concerns contribute to service improvement. It also identified uncertainty regarding scale, delivery model, and cost-effectiveness of the service, alongside the need for better integration in existing maternity and neonatal systems.
My Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, is chairing the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce to develop a national action plan to reform maternity and neonatal services. It will consider improvements to investigations and reviews, ensuring families get the support they need during these difficult times.
Asked by: Shivani Raja (Conservative - Leicester East)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of foreign-language public messaging by police forces on local community integration and social cohesion.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
Provision of interpreters and translation and language services, including via social media, are matters for Chief Constables and directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners, or equivalents. They are best placed to make these decisions based on their assessment of operational and community requirements, and available resource.
Asked by: Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party - Strangford)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what funding has been allocated to support community cohesion programmes.
Answered by Florence Eshalomi - Minister of State (Housing, Communities and Local Government)
Through Protecting What Matters, the government has set out initial steps to build more confident, cohesive and resilient communities.
This includes up to £5 million in 2026/27 for the Common Ground Resilience Fund to deliver targeted cohesion and integration interventions, alongside a £1 million expansion of the Common Ground programme to provide additional support for communities facing the greatest risk of antisemitism.
The government has also announced over £5 billion through its Pride in Place strategy, including £800 million over ten years for a further 40 areas where social cohesion is under pressure, enabling residents to shape local priorities and shared visions for their places.
Additional measures include £1.5 billion for cultural organisations, recognising their role in bringing communities together and restoring pride in place, £500,000 for community-led school linking projects that help young people from different backgrounds build relationships and understanding, and measures in the Local Media Action Plan, including a £6 million Local News Fund and an increase in Community Radio funding to £1 million per year, to support trusted local media and strengthen community connections and trust.
Asked by: Martin Wrigley (Liberal Democrat - Newton Abbot)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the HL1033, 6 July 2026, how many times the audit trail for access to data on the National Data Integration Tenant has been reviewed or audited since its implementation, and what the outcomes of those audits were.
Answered by James Frith - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The current access management process for the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT) was implemented in November 2025. All access and user activity is strictly monitored and audited by a dedicated NHS England team as part of a regular assurance process, as detailed in NHS England's response to the National Data Guardian, available at the following link:
Audit logs are reviewed to confirm the actions undertaken by users. In addition, comprehensive access audits have been carried out in December 2025, for all NDIT users; and in March and May 2026, for a subset of users.
These additional audits have confirmed that users have the appropriate permissions in line with approved access, that access corresponds to the projects established on the NDIT, that the level of access remains appropriate and necessary, and that Security Check clearance has been correctly evidenced and remains in date.
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