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 effect of socioeconomic inequalities on children's health outcomes throughout their lifetimes.

Inequalities experienced in childhood can lead to continuing problems across the life course. We want children to have the best start in life. Health visitors, as leaders of the Healthy Child Programme for 0-5 year olds, provide evidence-based public health interventions at community, family and individual levels.

Local commissioners are critical in providing quality services that address public health priorities associated with deprivation. These include services to tackle smoking in pregnancy, reduce childhood obesity, improve oral health and enhance early language skills.

Public Health England is working closely with the Department for Education to help parents improve their children’s early language and literacy skills before they start school. This aims to close the `word gap’ between disadvantaged children and their peers. An £8.5 million programme has opened for local authorities to fund projects aimed at disadvantaged children.

We are making an additional £1.4 billion available to transform children and young people’s mental health services from 2015/16 to 2019/20. This will mean that by 2020/21, 70,000 additional children and young people each year will be accessing National Health Service specialist mental health services. We are clear that there is still more to be done, hence why we have recently published a joint health and education Green Paper, one of the key proposals for which is to create new mental health support teams to deliver interventions for mild to moderate mental health needs for children and young people, in or close to schools and colleges.