Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 1 October (HL3630), and given that they do not collect data on the cost of responding to vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, what steps they are taking to establish a national framework to track NHS outbreak-response expenditure by disease type and shift the focus from treatment to prevention.

The shift from treatment to prevention is at the heart of the Government’s 10-Year Health Plan, and that plan explicitly recognises the importance of vaccines in helping to drive that shift. We will keep any proposals for strengthening those efforts under review, but we do not envisage any current need for a new framework of the kind the Noble Lord describes.