Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions his Department has had with the (a) Children’s Commissioner’s Office and (b) other partners on options for producing expenditure data on speech, language and communication services.

Departmental officials met with the Children’s Commissioner’s office in October 2019 to discuss the issues raised in her report ‘We need to talk: access to speech and language therapy’. The Department will continue to work with the Children’s Commissioner’s Office, the National Health Service and other stakeholders ahead of the intention to repeat a data gathering exercise within the next two years.