Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions her Department has had with cancer treatment support groups on the use of direct funds to support patients and their families.

Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government is working jointly with NHS England on implementing the delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlogs in elective care, and plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to help drive up and protect elective activity, including cancer treatment, which encompasses recovery spaces. Additionally, and as outlined in the 2024/25 NHS England Planning Guidance, NHS England are providing over £266 million in cancer service development funding to Cancer Alliances, to support delivery of the operational priorities for cancer.

The Department and NHS England meet regularly to discuss a wide range of issues regarding cancer. The Department's ministers and officials also frequently meet with key stakeholders within the cancer community, including discussions on support for patients and their families. As stated in the NHS Long Term Plan for Cancer, where appropriate, every person diagnosed with cancer will have access to personalised care, including needs assessment, a care plan and health and wellbeing information, and support. NHS England provides personalised cancer care and support plans, to support both patients and their families at all stages of their cancer journey. This is being delivered in line with the NHS Comprehensive Model for Personalised Care, empowering people to manage their care and the impact of their cancer, and maximise the potential of digital and community-based support. NHS England estimates that approximately 80% of cancer multidisciplinary teams are now offering Personalised Care and Support Planning, ensuring physical, practical, emotional, and social needs are identified and addressed at all stages of the cancer pathway. Additionally, Personalised Stratified Follow Up pathways, which adapt care to the needs of individual patients after cancer treatment, are being rolled out by cancer multi-disciplinary teams, and are required for at least eight cancer types by 2023/24.

General practice surgeries also conduct cancer care reviews at regular intervals after cancer diagnosis, to offer support with any needs patients may have. This includes providing access to other specialist-led services who work alongside patients’ medical teams, to support patients and their families, such as counsellors, rehabilitation specialists, or social prescribers, who can connect you to community groups or services for more support. This is part of NHS England’s drive to universal personalised care that will see at least 2.5 million people benefiting from personalised care by 2023/24.

NHS England and the integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning and ensuring the healthcare needs of local communities in England are met, including for cancer patients. NHS England provide access to a personal health budget, which is an amount of NHS money that is allocated to support the health and wellbeing needs of a patient if eligible. More information is available at the following link:

https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/help-with-health-costs/what-is-a-personal-health-budget/

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what funding has her Department allocated to provide recovery spaces for families of cancer treatment patients.

Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government is working jointly with NHS England on implementing the delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlogs in elective care, and plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to help drive up and protect elective activity, including cancer treatment, which encompasses recovery spaces. Additionally, and as outlined in the 2024/25 NHS England Planning Guidance, NHS England are providing over £266 million in cancer service development funding to Cancer Alliances, to support delivery of the operational priorities for cancer.

The Department and NHS England meet regularly to discuss a wide range of issues regarding cancer. The Department's ministers and officials also frequently meet with key stakeholders within the cancer community, including discussions on support for patients and their families. As stated in the NHS Long Term Plan for Cancer, where appropriate, every person diagnosed with cancer will have access to personalised care, including needs assessment, a care plan and health and wellbeing information, and support. NHS England provides personalised cancer care and support plans, to support both patients and their families at all stages of their cancer journey. This is being delivered in line with the NHS Comprehensive Model for Personalised Care, empowering people to manage their care and the impact of their cancer, and maximise the potential of digital and community-based support. NHS England estimates that approximately 80% of cancer multidisciplinary teams are now offering Personalised Care and Support Planning, ensuring physical, practical, emotional, and social needs are identified and addressed at all stages of the cancer pathway. Additionally, Personalised Stratified Follow Up pathways, which adapt care to the needs of individual patients after cancer treatment, are being rolled out by cancer multi-disciplinary teams, and are required for at least eight cancer types by 2023/24.

General practice surgeries also conduct cancer care reviews at regular intervals after cancer diagnosis, to offer support with any needs patients may have. This includes providing access to other specialist-led services who work alongside patients’ medical teams, to support patients and their families, such as counsellors, rehabilitation specialists, or social prescribers, who can connect you to community groups or services for more support. This is part of NHS England’s drive to universal personalised care that will see at least 2.5 million people benefiting from personalised care by 2023/24.

NHS England and the integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning and ensuring the healthcare needs of local communities in England are met, including for cancer patients. NHS England provide access to a personal health budget, which is an amount of NHS money that is allocated to support the health and wellbeing needs of a patient if eligible. More information is available at the following link:

https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/help-with-health-costs/what-is-a-personal-health-budget/

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to improve the treatment of Cholangiocarcinoma cancers; and whether a proportion of the additional funding allocated to her Department in the Spring Budget 2024 will be used to treat Cholangiocarcinoma cancers.

Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

Cancer is being diagnosed at an earlier stage, more often, with survival rates improving across almost all types of cancer, and the National Health Service has been seeing and treating record numbers of cancer patients over the last two years. Improving early diagnosis of cancer, including cholangiocarcinoma cancers, is a priority for the NHS. The NHS has an ambition to diagnose 75% of cancers at stage 1 or 2 by 2028, which will help tens of thousands of people live for longer.

Although funding for treatment isn’t allocated for specific cancers, the Government has provided significant additional funding to the NHS and adult social care in England. Measures introduced at the Spring Budget will protect levels of funding for the NHS in England in real terms in 2024/25, by providing an extra £2.5 billion for 2024/25, meaning a total budget of £164.9 billion.

While this additional spending is needed, the Government recognises that more money cannot always be the answer to improving outcomes for patients. Alongside the £2.5 billion of extra funding for day-to-day activities, the Government will invest £3.4 billion to reform the way the NHS works. This funding will significantly reduce the 13 million hours of time doctors spend on poor IT, freeing up significant capacity, and revolutionising treatment for a range of illnesses such as cancer and strokes. This will double the investment in technological and digital transformation in the NHS in England, and turn the NHS into one of the most digitally enabled, productive healthcare systems in the world.

On 14 August 2023, the Government published the Major Conditions Strategy’s Case for Change and Our Strategic Framework, which sets out our approach to making the choices over the next five years that will deliver the most value when facing the health challenges of today and of the decades ahead, including for cancer. It will look at the treatment and prevention of cancer, covering the patient pathway. The strategy will look at a wide range of interventions and enablers, to improve outcomes and experience for cancer patients.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance overpayments have been referred to HM Courts and Tribunals Service since February 2022.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

Since February 2022, there have been 119 cases accepted for prosecution for benefit fraud that were so serious they met the threshold for prosecution by The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) where Carer’s Allowance was the primary overpayment.

Note that this this figure only represents those cases accepted by CPS and does not indicate prosecution outcome. Data is for the period 1/2/2022 to 17/4/2024.

The data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance cases were flagged as potentially in need of investigation by the VEPs system in the 2023-24 financial year; and of these, how many (a) were and (b) were not investigated.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to paragraph 3.18 of the National Audit Office report entitled Investigation into overpayments of Carer’s Allowance, published on 26 April 2019, what changes were made to the business rules of the Verify Earnings and Pensions Service that revised downwards the number of alerts that were forecast to be generated from 380,000 to 75,000.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

A review of rules has provided a streamlined approach to the identification of VEP rules, enabling alignment with the latest HMRC data that feeds into DWP Real Time Earnings (RTE) system.

Examples of improvements include benefit specific rules, such as details of fluctuations in income, one off payments and irregular payments revision.

The Department is constantly reviewing available resources against priorities.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the total cost to the public purse of the Verify Earnings and Pensions Alerts service since it was introduced.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

The information requested is not held centrally and to collate it would incur disproportionate costs.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance cases his Department pursued for overpayments of (a) between (i) £500 and £999.99 and (ii) £1,000 and £2,000 and (b) more than £2,000 in 2023-24.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

We recognise the significant contribution of carers to supporting those most in need, which is why we have increased Carer's Allowance by almost £1,500 since 2010.

Claimants have a responsibility to ensure they are entitled to benefits they claim and to inform the DWP of any changes in their circumstances that could impact their award. For Carer’s Allowance, eligibility is partly dependent upon claimants earning £151 or less a week after tax, National Insurance and allowable expenses.

Where overpayments do occur, the Department has a duty to the taxpayer to protect public funds and to ask for money to be paid back. However, we seek to do so without causing hardship. We remain committed to working with anyone who is struggling with their repayment terms and will always look to negotiate sustainable and affordable repayment plans.

Our most recent statistics show that Carer's Allowance overpayments relating to earnings/employment represents 2.1% of our £3.3bn Carer’s Allowance expenditure.

The information requested has been provided in the table below.

The above data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many (a) additional work coaches and (b) additional hours of work coach time have been allocated to jobcentres to administer the Additional Jobcentre Support pilot.

Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

The pilot is being delivered using existing Jobcentre resource.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many school leavers who had been in receipt of free school meals were on Universal Credit six months after leaving school in (a) 2020, (b) 2021, (c) 2022 and (d) 2023.

Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

The information requested is not available.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will publish the outcomes of the (a) pre-testing phase, (b) phase one and (c) phase two of the additional job centre support pilot.

Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

An evaluation of the Additional Jobcentre Support pilot is ongoing.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average waiting time was for an initial assessment for people on the Access to Work Scheme in 2023.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

The average waiting time for a decision on an AtW application for the financial year 2023/24 was 45.1 days.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether he is taking steps to ensure that his Department's (a) policy and (b) guidance is (i) trauma-informed and (ii) co-produced with lived-experience experts.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

The DWP is committed to being a more Trauma Informed organisation. We have a dedicated programme which will integrate the six key pillars of the approach as defined by the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities (December, 2022) which are safety, trustworthiness, choice, empowerment, collaboration and cultural consideration. Our programme looks at these six pillars within the contexts of application to our colleagues, our customers, our culture, and the context of our interaction- whether that is a physical, telephony, digital or postal interaction. We are learning from best practice demonstrated by organisations such as NHS Education Scotland, Work Services Australia and the Wales ACES Hub to shape the future prioritisation of this work.

The integration programme is in its early phases, and we appreciate that it will take time to realise the benefits of changes we implement. We are learning from the continued progress of leaders in the field including programmes such as the Scottish National Trauma Transformation Programme. We recognise that an important aspect of many programmes is policies and procedures and intend to replicate this focus within our own work whilst recognising that the programme does not seek to change what the department does, instead we are impacting how we do this, which will extend to supporting our policy development.

We recognise that any truly trauma informed system is shaped by lived experience experts and we fundamentally believe in the co-production of this programme. This is why we have an extensive network of diverse internal and external stakeholders who are engaged in shaping the programme through ongoing forums and insight activity. We are also currently collaborating with the University of Salford on research which explores how trauma informed the department is through conversations with customers, colleagues and external stakeholders. The outcome of this research will help to shape the future priorities of the programme. Finally, we are currently exploring how we establish our own co-production forums for the programme taking advice from expert stakeholders to ensure we create a safe, empowering space for lived experience experts to whilst establishing trust in the ongoing aims and progress of the programme.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Universal Support pilot schemes.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

Universal Support is being delivered in two phases. The expansions to Individual Placement and Support in Primary Care (IPSPC) and the Work and Health Programme (WHP Pioneer) are being rolled out for phase one of the service. The aim of phase one is to provide help to up to 50 thousand more disabled people and those with health conditions who want to work, while learning more lessons about how to scale up support for these groups.

WHP Pioneer data will start to be published from May 2024. We are committed to publishing IPSPC programme data in due course. The interim and final evaluation reports for Universal Support Phase 1 covering WHP Pioneer and IPSPC will also be published.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made with Cabinet colleagues of the potential impact of the Disability Confident scheme on the disability employment gap.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

Disability Confident (DC) is one of a range of policies to support disabled people into work and to close the disability employment gap. It is difficult to isolate the direct impact of individual policies on the disability employment gap as numerous, interacting factors are at play, including overall labour market trends and changes to the composition of the disabled population, in addition to the effects of disability employment policies and programmes in themselves.

When an employer signs up to DC, they agree to commitments which encourage employers to think differently about disability and to take positive action to address issues disabled employees face in the workplace. There are currently over 19,000 DC members and they estimate 11.5 million employees in total working in their businesses.

In September 2023, the Department published findings from a survey with members of the DC scheme, conducted by an independent research agency[1]. The research explored the effect that signing up to the DC scheme had on members’ recruitment and retention attitudes towards disabled people.

The DWP and Cabinet officials regularly meet with Ministerial Disability Champions to drive this agenda across Government. The Champions’ role is to ensure disability inclusion is a priority in their Department’s work. They are helping to deliver our commitment to support disabled people in the UK through creating more opportunities, protecting their rights and ensuring they fully benefit from, and can contribute to, every aspect of our society.

[1] The survey was conducted in February to March 2022. In total 1,233 survey interviews were conducted with scheme members.

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help broaden access to work experience for disadvantaged young people.

Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)

Work experience is an important aspect of the support pupils receive to follow rewarding learning and training pathways which lead to fulfilling careers.

The department works with The Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) to support secondary schools to provide pupils with multiple interactions with employers from year 7 to year 13 in line with Gatsby Benchmark 6, Experiences of the Workplace. The department has asked CEC to drive this agenda forward at pace to increase workplace opportunities, targeting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, in response to evidence that these pupils are less likely to access work experience opportunities than their peers. In the latest annual data, 64% of institutions fully achieved the experiences of the workplace benchmark, which is a 12% increase from the year before.

The CEC Careers Hub network has been asked to use a proportion of their Hub Delivery Fund to stimulate meaningful employer-led activities to increase the quantity and quality of opportunities for young people to engage in encounters of the workplace with a focus on alternative provision, special educational needs and disabilities and Pupil Referral Units across all year groups.

In addition, £1.9 million has been invested to support Careers Hubs to offer workplace experiences for up to 15,000 economically disadvantaged young people, including virtual workplace experience pilots for more than 1,000 schools in coastal and rural communities, providing access to wider national networks of employers outside their local community.