Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) health visitors, (b) sure start centres and (c) family nurse partners in each year from 2014-15 to 2019-20.

Responsibility for commissioning of health visiting services transferred to local authorities in October 2015. Local authorities are best placed to respond to the needs of their local population.

National Health Service trusts and private sector organisations to provide health visiting services. There is no single source that counts health visitors across the whole public sector.

NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care, general practitioner surgeries, local authorities or other providers.

Source: NHS Digital. NHS Workforce Statistics

NHS Digital collects and publishes data on staff, including health visitors, in some English independent sector healthcare organisations. These statistics do not represent the entire independent sector workforce as only 59 organisations provided data for March 2020.

The following table shows the number of FTE health visitors as at September each year since 2015 and March 2020, which is the latest available data.

Source: NHS Digital. Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics

As at March 2020, there were 3,022 children’s centre sites open to families and children providing children’s centre services. Information is not held centrally on the number of family nurse partners.