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 invest more in prevention and public health.

For 2025/26, the Government increased the Public Health Grant by £224 million to support local authorities to deliver public health services. The Government will continue to invest in local authorities' vital public health work, providing more than £13.4 billion over the next three years through a consolidated Public Health Grant and giving authorities certainty over their future funding with a three-year settlement.

Annual National Health Service spending will increase by £15 billion in real terms by 2028/29, taking the resource budget to £225 billion, and the health capital budget will increase to £15.2 billion by the end of the Spending Review period. This will support national public health services such as world-leading immunisation programmes, including new vaccinations for chickenpox, helping to prevent young children from getting seriously ill and raising a healthier generation, and screening programmes to detect, act, and in some cases to prevent serious diseases. It will enable investment in wider preventative services, including Neighbourhood Health which will focus resources on keeping people well and shifting activity out of hospital and into local communities, and will deliver 250 neighbourhood health centres, with the first 120 upgrades due to be operational by 2030.