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 integrated care boards encourage social prescribing.

As of June 2022, there were more than 2,793 new social prescribing link workers in the National Health Service and as of November 2022, over 1.3 million people have been referred to social prescribing. The Department is also providing grant funding to the National Academy of Social Prescribing to advance social prescribing and disseminate good practice.

In 2021, NHS England issued guidance which stated that by April 2022, all integrated care boards were expected to have developed a formal agreement for engaging and embedding the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise sector in system-level governance and decision-making arrangements. The implementation guidance also describes embedding social prescribing services in integrated care systems.