Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
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 improve access to mental health services for children in North East Somerset and Hanham.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The 10-Year Health Plan sets out ambitious plans to boost mental health support across the country, including children and young people’s mental health services in the North East Somerset and Hanham constituency.
As prioritised in our Medium-Term Planning Framework, we are taking action to reduce the longest waits for specialist mental health support, tackling regional disparities, and expanding access, thereby making services more productive so children and young people spend less time waiting for the treatment they need.
We are also accelerating the rollout of Mental Health Support Teams in schools and colleges to reach full national coverage by 2029. With an additional 900,000 children and young people having access by spring 2026, 60% of all pupils will have access to this early support at school, up from 44% in spring 2024. As part of this, we are investing an additional £13 million to pilot enhanced training for staff so that they can offer more effective support to young people with complex needs, such as trauma, neurodivergence, and disordered eating.
More widely, we are rolling out Young Futures Hubs. The Government’s first 50 Young Futures Hubs will bring together services at a local level to support children and young people, helping to ensure that young people can access early advice and wellbeing intervention. We will work to ensure that there is no wrong door for young people who need support with their mental health.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to accelerate the pay review process so that NHS staff in North East Somerset and Hanham constituency receive uplifts nearer the start of the financial year.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government has taken a number of steps to accelerate the National Health Service pay review process, aiming to ensure that pay uplifts for staff are implemented as close to the start of the financial year as possible.
Having accepted the 2025/26 headline pay recommendations in full, the Government issued remit letters to the Pay Review Bodies in July 2025 formally beginning the 2026/27 pay round over two months earlier than last year.
We have now published our written evidence reports for the three pay review bodies, the NHS Pay Review Body, the Review Body on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration, and the Senior Salaries Review Body, which cover pay for most NHS staff. Our oral evidence sessions that follow publication of the written evidence took place in November and December 2025. This puts us on track to meet my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care’s ambition to announce and implement pay uplifts into pay packets as close to 1 April 2026 as possible.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will publish a national strategy for palliative and end-of-life care.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government is developing a Palliative Care and End of Life Care Modern Service Framework for England. I refer the Hon. Member to the Written Ministerial Statement HCWS1087 I gave to the House on 24 November 2025.
The MSF will drive improvements in the services that patients and their families receive at the end of life and will enable integrated care boards to address challenges in access, quality, and sustainability through the delivery of high-quality, personalised care. This will be aligned with the ambitions set out in the recently published 10-Year Health Plan.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
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 improve early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in primary care in North East Somerset and Hanham constituency.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Action includes the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board providing £1.8 million to support hypertension services. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is one of the most important risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
Implementation is continuing this year, in 2025/26, and includes partnership working with community pharmacy to case find undiagnosed hypertension. £30,000 of the funding has also been invested to increase the uptake and quality of the national Blood Pressure Community Pharmacy service.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on reducing waiting times for children requiring speech and language therapy.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Community health services, including children’s speech and language therapy, are locally commissioned to enable systems to best meet the needs of their communities.
For 2026/27 we have asked systems to actively manage long waits for community health services, including reducing the proportion of waits over 18 weeks, developing a plan to eliminate all 52-week waits, and increasing community health services capacity to meet growth in demand, expected to be approximately 3% nationally per year.
NHS England is working with the Department for Education to identify and support children with speech, language, and communication needs by co-funding pathfinder sites to deliver the Early Language Support for Every Child programme.
The programme aims to identify and support children and young people in early years and primary school settings with mild to moderate speech, language, and communication needs, reducing the rate of specialist referrals, and increasing workforce capacity through innovative workforce models.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress is being made to ensure women in North East Somerset & Hanham have access to menopause treatments on the NHS.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government recognises that women suffering from symptoms of menopause have been failed for far too long, and we acknowledge the impact it has on women’s lives, relationships, and participation in the workplace.
The number of women in Bath and North East Somerset receiving hormone replacement therapy, commonly used to relieve menopause symptoms, has increased by approximately 85%, from 15,770 women in 2021/22, to 29,140 in 2024/25. The Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire integrated care board (ICB) has also commissioned its general practices (GPs) to provide testosterone replacement to menopausal women, who are affected by low libido as a result of ongoing hormone replacement therapy treatments.
Hanham falls within the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care System area, within which seven primary care networks are trialling the use of group education and group consultations for menopause. Over 1,000 people have attended a group education session. The University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust Menopause Service is running a training clinic for six GPs with additional qualifications in menopause, to upskill further in menopause care and help reduce waiting lists.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress is being made to improve North East Somerset & Hanham patient access to GPs.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are expanding capacity in general practice and delivering more appointments to patients. North East Somerset and Hanham sit within the NHS Somerset Integrated Care Board area, which has seen a 9.4% rise in the number of general practice appointments delivered over the past year, with 304,000 appointments delivered in September 2025 compared to 278,000 appointments delivered in September 2024. This is above the national average increase of 6.6%.
In October 2024, we have invested £160 million into the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme and given additional flexibilities to recruit 2,500 new general practitioners into primary care networks across England. We have invested an additional £1.1 billion in general practice to reinforce the front door of the NHS. This is the biggest increase in over a decade. Additionally, the new £102 million Primary Care Utilisation and Modernisation Fund will create additional clinical space within over 1,000 general practices across England to deliver 8.3 million more appointments each year.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
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 strengthen maternity and neonatal care for people in North East Somerset & Hanham.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The University Hospitals Bristol and Weston Trust (UHBW), the North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT), and the Royal United Hospitals NHS Trust (RUH) provide maternity services for North East Somerset and Hanham.
Steps taken at UHBW and NBT include: a well-established Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership (MNVP) that replicates national guidance; achieving full compliance against all 10 maternity safety actions for the second year running; good progress against ‘Saving Babies Lives’ Version 3; and working to reduce inequalities in maternity and neonatal care through collaboration with the Race and Health Observatory and Black Maternity Matters anti-racism training for perinatal staff.
Steps taken at RUH include robust oversight of perinatal quality improvement projects as part of NHS England’s ‘Savings Babies Lives’ care bundle, including the smoke-free pregnancy incentive voucher scheme, and working with families through initiatives such as the MNVP.
At a national level, Baroness Amos is leading a rapid, national, independent investigation into National Health Service maternity and neonatal services to help us to understand the systemic issues behind why so many women, babies, and families experience unacceptable care. The Government is also setting up a National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. The taskforce will take forward the recommendations of the investigation to develop a new national action plan to drive improvements across maternity and neonatal care.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his department is making on its target to reduce the time taken for cancer diagnoses.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department is supporting the National Health Service to meet the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), for 75% of patients to be diagnosed or have cancer ruled out within 28 days of being referred urgently by their general practitioner for suspected cancer. NHS England collects and publishes monthly FDS performance data nationally and for individual cancer groups.
To achieve the FDS, NHS England rolled out public awareness campaigns of cancer signs and symptoms, streamlined referral routes for different cancer types, and is increasing the availability of diagnostic capacity through the roll-out of more community diagnostic centres.
NHS England has also achieved full roll out of non-specific symptom pathways for patients who present with vague and non-site-specific symptoms which do not clearly align to a tumour type.
Between October 2024 and September 2025, approximately 193,000 more patients got a cancer diagnosis or the all-clear on time than in the year from July 2023 to June 2024.
Asked by: Dan Norris (Independent - North East Somerset and Hanham)
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 support hospices to provide high quality end-of-life care.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We want a society where every person receives high-quality, compassionate care from diagnosis through to the end of life. Whilst the majority of palliative care and end of life care is provided by National Health Service staff and services, we recognise the vital part that voluntary sector organisations, including hospices, also play in providing support to people at the end of life and their loved ones.
We are supporting the hospice sector with a £100 million capital funding boost for eligible adult and children’s hospices in England to ensure they have the best physical environment for care.
We are also providing £26 million in revenue funding to support children and young people’s hospices for 2025/26. This is a continuation of the funding which, until recently, was known as the children and young people’s hospice grant.
I can also now confirm the continuation of this vital funding for the three years of the next spending review period, 2026/27 to 2028/29 inclusive. This funding will see circa £26 million, adjusted for inflation, allocated to children and young people’s hospices in England each year, via their local integrated care boards on behalf of NHS England, as happened in 2024/25 and 2025/26. This amounts to approximately £80 million over the next three years.
In the long-term, the Government and the NHS will closely monitor the shift towards the strategic commissioning of palliative care and end of life care services to ensure that services reduce variation in access and quality, although some variation may be appropriate to reflect both innovation and the needs of local populations.
Officials will present further proposals to ministers over the coming months, outlining the drivers and incentives that are required in palliative care and end of life care to enable the shift from hospital to community, including as part of neighbourhood health teams.