Asked by: Carolyn Harris (Labour - Neath and Swansea East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many reports were submitted by members of the public through the Yellow Card scheme, in each of the past five years, in relation to the sale of (a) counterfeit medicines, (b) unapproved medicines in the UK, and (c) medicines which are authorised for supply in the UK but supplied through unregulated channels.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Answering the question raised by the Hon. Member would require the Medicines and Healthcare Products Agency staff to go through a large volume of data manually. This is because the information is not held in such a way to be able to filter by the requested categories.
The sections (a) and (b) would require a data extraction to identify all reports received from members of the public over the last five years. Following this, a manual review would need to be undertaken of every report to cross reference the suspect drug against all active licenses at the time of reporting for each individual case and would thereby incur disproportionate cost. Section (c) is information which is not held in the Yellow Card database.
The Guide to Parliamentary Work sets here out that there is an advisory cost limit known as the disproportionate cost threshold which is the level above which departments can decide not to answer a written question. The Guide to Parliamentary Work is published online and is available at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-parliamentary-work
Asked by: Mike Wood (Conservative - Kingswinford and South Staffordshire)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what has been the total cost to date of the Thirlwall Inquiry.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The total cost of the Thirlwall Inquiry from its commencement in September 2023 to the end of March 2026 is £18,718,000.00. This includes March 2026 forecasted amounts.
Asked by: Lee Anderson (Reform UK - Ashfield)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure any (a) delays delays to CQC inspections and (b) changes in the level demand in the social care system does not affect the frequency of inspections of care homes.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department is holding the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to account for its performance and has strengthened oversight following Dr Penny Dash’s review of the CQC’s operational effectiveness, including improvements in timeliness of assessments.
The CQC has pledged to respond rapidly to urgent and extreme risks, prioritising services registered for over a year without assessment or inspection and those with outdated ratings. From January 2026, this refreshed approach will enable the CQC to prioritise settings, including care homes.
In the 2024/25 financial year, the CQC completed 2,292 assessments of adult social care services. From 1 April 2025 to 22 March 2026, the CQC completed 3,546 assessments of adult social care services, an increase of 55%.
The CQC is piloting a number of initiatives to increase the number of assessments they can deliver in adult care per year to ensure care settings are inspected regularly, and these will be rolled out in the first half of the 2026/27 financial year.
Asked by: Lee Anderson (Reform UK - Ashfield)
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 ensure that care homes are inspected regularly.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department is holding the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to account for its performance and has strengthened oversight following Dr Penny Dash’s review of the CQC’s operational effectiveness, including improvements in timeliness of assessments.
The CQC has pledged to respond rapidly to urgent and extreme risks, prioritising services registered for over a year without assessment or inspection and those with outdated ratings. From January 2026, this refreshed approach will enable the CQC to prioritise settings, including care homes.
In the 2024/25 financial year, the CQC completed 2,292 assessments of adult social care services. From 1 April 2025 to 22 March 2026, the CQC completed 3,546 assessments of adult social care services, an increase of 55%.
The CQC is piloting a number of initiatives to increase the number of assessments they can deliver in adult care per year to ensure care settings are inspected regularly, and these will be rolled out in the first half of the 2026/27 financial year.
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 his Department has made of the potential impact of mandatory pre-referral Advice and Guidance requirements from 1 April 2026 on workload transferred to GP practices, including the workload arising from acting on specialist advice responses, requesting and reviewing diagnostic investigations recommended by specialists, and managing patients while awaiting responses; and whether additional funding has been allocated to reflect that workload transfer.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Advice and Guidance (A&G) is designed to support quicker, clearer clinical decision making, by enabling general practitioners (GPs) and specialists to discuss and agree on the most appropriate next steps for a patient. The 2026/27 GP Contract does not mandate the use of A&G in all circumstances. Instead, practices are expected to use A&G prior to or in place of a planned care referral, where clinically appropriate, and to follow locally agreed referral pathways.
In 2025/26 we introduced a £20 payment for GPs for each A&G request, allocating up to a total of £80 million of new funding, which has supported significant increases in A&G. For 2026/27, this funding is being incorporated into the GP Contract to provide a consistent, streamlined approach that recognises the vital role of GPs in delivering A&G. Embedding A&G in the GP Contract recognises it as routine clinical practice, removes annual signups, and provides more predictable funding while supporting consistent patient pathways.
We are investing £485 million in GPs in 2026/27, bringing the total spend on the GP Contract to over £13.8 billion. This builds on last year’s £1.1 billion of investment. This uplift represents a 3.6% cash increase, or 1.4% real terms increase, and includes an assumed pay increase of 2.5%. As with previous years, we have asked the independent pay review body for Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration, for a pay recommendation for 2026/27 for the Government to consider.
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, if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of the consistency of the mandatory Single Point of Access triage process with NHS England's Jess's Rule guidance; and what safeguards are in place to ensure that a mandatory Single Point of Access triage process does not return to primary care a patient whom a GP has referred in accordance with that guidance.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Single Point of Access (SPoA) triage process is consistent with Jess’s Rule.
Jess’s Rule is an NHS England patient safety initiative for primary care. It is designed for general practitioners (GPs) and supports them to reconsider a patient’s presentation and/or diagnosis where the patient has attended a GP three or more times and symptoms have escalated, or the diagnosis is uncertain.
Jess’s Rule can be used to support a GP’s decision on an appropriate referral within the SPoA model. SPoA will provide a more efficient approach to triaging patients, with all appropriate requests and referrals, excluding urgent suspect cancer, flowing through a single ‘front door’. SPoA supports clinical triage to the most appropriate service or outcome, meaning timelier, more joined-up care for patients. Patients will still have a choice about where they receive care.
Safeguards within the SPoA model include senior clinical oversight of triage decisions and the ability for primary care clinicians to re‑escalate concerns where symptoms persist, worsen, or remain unexplained. These arrangements aim to ensure patients who require specialist assessment are not inappropriately managed in the community, and that shared clinical judgement remains central to decision‑making.
Asked by: Damien Egan (Labour - Bristol North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance has been issued to clinicians on recording suspected Topical Steroid Withdrawal in patient medical records, including GP records, where a formal diagnosis has not been made.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
No specific guidance has been issued on recording suspected topical steroid withdrawal in patient medical records, including to general practitioners. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has issued guidance documents on topical steroid withdrawal, which are available at the following two links:
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has also published guidance, which is available at the following link:
Asked by: Iqbal Mohamed (Independent - Dewsbury and Batley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether Local Authorities have the right to move adults with disabilities to residential care away from their families and against the wishes of the individual and/or their families.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Under section 9(5) of the Care Act 2014, local authorities are required to involve the adult concerned and, where appropriate, their carers, family members, or others with an interest in their welfare, when carrying out a needs assessment and considering how care and support needs should be met.
Under the Care Act 2014, local authorities are also tasked with the duty to shape their care markets to meet the diverse needs of all local people. This includes commissioning a diverse range of care and support services that enable people to access quality care.
Local authorities should engage with people who draw on care and support, and their families and carers, to inform commissioning decisions and to consider the outcomes which matter to them. This is reflected in the Care and Support Statutory Guidance, which supports local authorities to fulfil their Care Act duties, including expectations around involvement and co‑production with people who draw on care and support and their families.
Under the Health and Care Act 2022, the Care Quality Commission has a statutory duty to assess how well local authorities are delivering their adult social care duties.
Asked by: Carolyn Harris (Labour - Neath and Swansea East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many reports submitted by members of the public through the Yellow Card scheme resulted in enforcement action by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, in each of the past five years, in relation to the sale of (a) counterfeit medicines, (b) unapproved medicines in the UK and (c) medicines which are authorised for supply in the UK but supplied through unregulated channels.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
I refer the Hon. Member to the answer I gave on 31 March 2026 to Question 122732.
The Yellow Card scheme collects reports of suspected adverse drug reactions, medical device incidents, and concerns about the safety and quality of medicines. Where appropriate, reports raising potential counterfeit, compliance, or safety issues may be referred to relevant teams within the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for consideration of regulatory or enforcement action.
However, this information is not held in a format that readily allows the MHRA to identify how many reports submitted by members of the public resulted in enforcement action in relation to counterfeit medicines, unapproved medicines in the UK, and medicines which are authorised for supply in the United Kingdom but supplied through unregulated channels. Extracting this information from Yellow Card reports would require a manual review of individual records and would incur disproportionate cost. The MHRA is therefore unable to provide the requested figures for each of the past five years.
Asked by: Louie French (Conservative - Old Bexley and Sidcup)
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 help support people with (a) Musculoskeletal conditions and (b) back pain conditions in Old Bexley and Sidcup constituency; and if he will make it his policy to utilise chiropractic capacity to support treatment within the NHS.
Answered by Sharon Hodgson - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
To support people with musculoskeletal (MSK) and back pain conditions, we are working to deliver the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) MSK Community Delivery Programme. GIRFT teams are working with health system leaders to further reduce MSK community waiting times, which are the highest of all community waits, and to improve data, metrics, and referral pathways to wider support services.
In the Old Bexley and Sidcup constituency, those seeking support for MSK conditions and back pain conditions can access services such as the Bexley MSK Service, which provides specialist care for adults in the Bexley area experiencing a wide range of MSK conditions and which offers personalised treatment plans tailored to individual needs. Launched in Summer 2025, the getUBetter app, commissioned by the NHS South East London Integrated Care Board, is also accessible to Bexley residents aged 16 years old or over and those registered with a Bexley general practice. It offers information on local services, including self-referral options for leisure activities supporting health and wellbeing.
NHS England does not nationally commission chiropractic care as it is a complementary and alternative medicine. Integrated care boards can make independent decisions on which health professionals they employ and may commission a limited amount of such treatment.