Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to deliver 50 new neighbourhood health centres by the end of this Parliament; and whether any will be built in Cumbria.

The Government is committed to delivering a National Health Service that is fit for the future, and we recognise that delivering high quality NHS healthcare requires the right infrastructure in the right places.

That is why over the course of our 10-Year Health Plan, we aim to establish a Neighbourhood Health Centre in every community, transforming healthcare access by bringing historically hospital-based services into communities and addressing wider determinants of health through services like debt advice, employment support, and obesity management programmes.

Nationwide coverage will take time, but we are starting in the areas of greatest need where healthy life expectancy is lowest, including rural towns and communities with higher deprivation levels, using public capital to update and refurbish existing, under-used buildings.

We recently announced the places that will form wave 1 of the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme (NNHIP), after a rigorous assessment of applications against the core criteria. The first wave of the NNHIP covers 43 sites across England, from Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in the south-west to Sunderland in the north-east, ensuring that communities nationwide benefit from this new model of care.