Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what national guidelines his Department has issued on provision of speech and language therapy.

The Department does not issue guidance to clinical commissioning groups on the commissioning arrangements or provision of speech and language therapy.

NHS England has responsibility for issuing guidance to clinical commissioning groups, though it has not issued any guidance on speech and language therapy.

Clinical commissioning groups are required to take into account guidance produced by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which contains systematically-developed recommendations based on the best available evidence, to guide decisions for a particular area of health. For example, the NICE Stroke rehabilitation guidelines recommend several services for people with stroke to be provided by speech and language therapists, such as providing direct impairment-based therapy to improve communication.