Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress his Department has made in improving maternity and early years care.

We have made improving maternity services a key objective in our Mandate to NHS England. Over the past two years we have also invested 35 million pounds of capital funding to improve the physical environment of over 140 maternity units.

We have increased the numbers of midwives and health visitors. There are 1,700 more midwives and over 2,000 more health visitors than in 2010. In addition, there are more than 6,000 midwifery students in training. And we are committed to having an extra 4,200 health visitors by 2015.

We are expanding the Family Nurse Partnership programme - which provides dedicated one to one support to young, at risk first time mothers - to 16,000 places by 2015.

We launched the NHS Start4life Information Service for Parents, a digital service for parent-to-be and new parents in May 2012. Take up has already exceeded the sign-up target of 300,000 parents by 2015 - as of 1 June over 339,000 parents had signed up to the service.