Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding his Department has allocated to projects intended to help speed up digitisation in the social care sector in each of the last three financial years.

In December 2021, the Government announced plans to invest at least £150 million to digitise adult social care. We have made good progress so far with care provider usage of digital social care records increasing by more than 10 percentage points from a starting point of 40%.

In financial year 2022/23, we invested £47.5 million to support digitisation and improve cyber resilience in the sector. In financial year 2021/2022, we invested around £13.3 million to pilot care technologies and to test our delivery model. Prior to the 2021 spending review settlement, from 2016-2021 NHS Digital, funded by the Department, invested £22.8 million in social care digitisation as part of its Social Care Programme. A further £1.1 million was spent by the Department in 2020/21.