Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department has taken to restore the availability of data on Healthy Start uptake on the Healthy Start website.

The Department for Work and Pensions has identified an error in their data that means that the data published for Healthy Start uptake from July 2023 onwards was incorrect. It is important to state that the data used to calculate the uptake rate is not used as part of the live check to determine eligibility for individual applicants to Healthy Start, and no individual applicants or beneficiaries have been impacted, The Department for Work and Pensions has fixed the issue, and additional checks have been added to the process to ensure the issue does not occur in the future.

The incorrect data has been removed from the NHS Healthy Start website by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHS BSA), who run the Healthy Start scheme on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care. Corrected and updated data for March 2024 will be published by the NHS BSA shortly.