Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of replacing the existing paper Healthy Start Voucher scheme with a digital card version.

The NHS Business Services Authority are leading work to digitise the Healthy Start scheme, to facilitate families to apply for, receive and use Healthy Start benefits.

There will be several benefits achieved with the move to a fully digitised system which include greater flexibility to individual families by removing the requirement for the full value to be spent in a single transaction, which is currently the case with paper vouchers and a reduction in the stigma associated with paper vouchers.