Asked by: Clive Jones (Liberal Democrat - Wokingham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what statistics he has on the demand for and use of wheelchairs; and how that data informs NHS England’s commissioning of appropriate services.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services, based on the needs of their local population. NHS England supports ICBs to commission effective, efficient, and personalised wheelchair services and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment.
This includes the introduction of personal wheelchair budgets, including through legal rights in 2019, providing a clear framework for ICBs to commission personalised wheelchair services which are outcomes focused and integrated. Personal wheelchair budgets give people greater choice over the wheelchair provided.
NHS England also published a Wheelchair Quality Framework on 9 April 2025, which sets out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs. The framework is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/wheelchair-quality-framework/
Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from ICBs on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required. The latest figures from the Quarter 2 2025/26 National Wheelchair Data Collection showed that 84% of adults and 78% of children received their equipment within 18 weeks. Further information on the National Wheelchair Data Collection is available at the following link:
Local authorities in England have a statutory duty under various legislations, including the Care Act 2014, and the Children and Families Act 2014, to make arrangements for the provision of disability aids and community equipment, to meet the assessed eligible needs of individuals who are resident in their area. Some local authorities deliver this themselves, but a significant number have external contracts for an integrated community equipment service.
NHS England is also responsible for determining allocations of financial resources to ICBs. NHS England’s allocations policy aims to support equal opportunity of access for equal need, alongside NHS England’s duties to reduce health inequalities that are amenable to healthcare.
My Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has marked 2025/26 as a financial reset year with the publication of Planning Guidance 2025/26. He has been clear that systems must live within their means, exhausting all opportunities to improve productivity, tackle waste, and take decisions on how to prioritise resources to best meet the health needs of their local population.
Asked by: Clive Jones (Liberal Democrat - Wokingham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to make the recently developed service specification guidelines for wheelchair services mandatory across England.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services, based on the needs of their local population. NHS England supports ICBs to commission effective, efficient, and personalised wheelchair services and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment.
This includes publishing a Wheelchair Quality Framework on 9 April 2025, which sets out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs. The framework is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/wheelchair-quality-framework/
NHS England also introduced personal wheelchair budgets, including legal rights in 2019, providing a clear framework for ICBs to commission personalised wheelchair services which are outcomes focused and integrated. Personal wheelchair budgets give people greater choice over the wheelchair provided.
Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from ICBs on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required. The latest figures from the Quarter 2 2025/26 National Wheelchair Data Collection showed that 84% of adults and 78% of children received their equipment within 18 weeks. Further information on the National Wheelchair Data Collection is available at the following link:
The Medium-Term Planning Framework sets a requirement for all providers and ICBs to actively manage long waits for community health services reducing the proportion of all waits over 18 weeks. This will be monitored via the NHS’s usual regional and national assurance processes.
The Community Health Services Situation Report, which will be used to monitor ICB performance against waiting time targets in 2026/27, currently monitors waiting times for both children and young people, and adult waiting times under the ‘Wheelchair, Orthotics, Prosthetics and Equipment’ line. These targets will guide systems to reduce the longest waits, and improvement initiatives to meet these targets may affect waits that are over 18-weeks and 52-weeks.
Asked by: Layla Moran (Liberal Democrat - Oxford West and Abingdon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how lipoedema is classified within NICE guidance and NHS commissioning frameworks; and whether he plans to review the categorisation of lipoedema-related interventions to ensure they reflect clinical need.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Lipoedema services in England are commissioned locally by integrated care boards (ICBs), which are responsible for assessing the needs of their local populations and determining the most appropriate services to support people with long‑term conditions such as lipoedema.
There is no single national specification for lipoedema services. Instead, ICBs draw on a range of national guidance and best‑practice resources when designing care pathways. These include guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and best‑practice frameworks produced by bodies such as Wounds UK and the Royal College of General Practitioners. This helps ensure that services are safe, effective, and based on the best available evidence.
Most people with lipoedema are supported through primary and community care services, including assessment by local lymphoedema teams, compression therapy, advice on skin care and movement, and support with self‑management. These services aim to help people manage symptoms and maintain mobility and quality of life.
NICE classifies lipoedema within its interventional procedures guidance on the use of liposuction for chronic lipoedema, reference code HTG618, as a chronic, often painful, and progressive condition characterised by the abnormal, symmetrical accumulation of fat in the legs, hips, buttocks, and sometimes arms. In this guidance, NICE concluded that current evidence on both safety and effectiveness is limited and, therefore, recommends that liposuction should only be undertaken within the context of research or under rigorous governance arrangements. This guidance informs, but does not mandate, local commissioning decisions. NICE will review this guidance once the full results of the ongoing LIPLEG clinical trial are available, and will update its recommendations if new evidence supports doing so.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to strengthen the evidence base for assessing the wider economic and societal impacts of vaccination; and what assessment they have made of the potential benefits for evidence generation of explicitly incorporating such impacts into health technology assessment frameworks.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government recognises the value in improving our understanding of the impact that vaccines have on wider society. Demonstrating the impact that childhood vaccines can have on the number of days of education that children may miss, for example, could encourage greater uptake of childhood vaccination. We have recently been able to say that childhood chickenpox costs the United Kingdom’s economy £24 million every year in lost income and productivity, and the chickenpox vaccination programme launched last month is expected to reduce that loss.
Vaccine appraisals play a particular role within the process of understanding that value, using the best robust evidence available across all vaccination programmes to focus investment of the health budget on programmes that deliver the greatest health benefit to the greatest number of people. Focusing our appraisal process on health benefits and costs, which have better evidence than socio-economic impacts, follows the process used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
If this process were to change, and wider socio-economic benefits were to be formally included, this could have unintended consequences. For example, it could have the effect of prioritising investment in vaccines for working populations over those who are not or will not be economically active. Additionally, the available data on socio-economic benefits is robust for only a small number of vaccines. Factoring this data into appraisals for only a small number of vaccines would create a bias for these programmes with better quality data. Conversely, if this data on wider benefits were to be factored into appraisals for all vaccination programmes, the use of lower quality data risks increasing uncertainty in appraisals and reduces our ability to ensure responsible and effective spending of public funds.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the economic and societal costs of maintaining a health technology assessment framework for vaccines that does not explicitly account for wider impacts beyond the health system, including potential losses to productivity.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government recognises the value in improving our understanding of the impact that vaccines have on wider society. Demonstrating the impact that childhood vaccines can have on the number of days of education that children may miss, for example, could encourage greater uptake of childhood vaccination. We have recently been able to say that childhood chickenpox costs the United Kingdom’s economy £24 million every year in lost income and productivity, and the chickenpox vaccination programme launched last month is expected to reduce that loss.
Vaccine appraisals play a particular role within the process of understanding that value, using the best robust evidence available across all vaccination programmes to focus investment of the health budget on programmes that deliver the greatest health benefit to the greatest number of people. Focusing our appraisal process on health benefits and costs, which have better evidence than socio-economic impacts, follows the process used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
If this process were to change, and wider socio-economic benefits were to be formally included, this could have unintended consequences. For example, it could have the effect of prioritising investment in vaccines for working populations over those who are not or will not be economically active. Additionally, the available data on socio-economic benefits is robust for only a small number of vaccines. Factoring this data into appraisals for only a small number of vaccines would create a bias for these programmes with better quality data. Conversely, if this data on wider benefits were to be factored into appraisals for all vaccination programmes, the use of lower quality data risks increasing uncertainty in appraisals and reduces our ability to ensure responsible and effective spending of public funds.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the potential benefits of incorporating wider societal impacts into health technology assessments on the assessment of value for money and long term return on investment for vaccination programmes.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government recognises the value in improving our understanding of the impact that vaccines have on wider society. Demonstrating the impact that childhood vaccines can have on the number of days of education that children may miss, for example, could encourage greater uptake of childhood vaccination. We have recently been able to say that childhood chickenpox costs the United Kingdom’s economy £24 million every year in lost income and productivity, and the chickenpox vaccination programme launched last month is expected to reduce that loss.
Vaccine appraisals play a particular role within the process of understanding that value, using the best robust evidence available across all vaccination programmes to focus investment of the health budget on programmes that deliver the greatest health benefit to the greatest number of people. Focusing our appraisal process on health benefits and costs, which have better evidence than socio-economic impacts, follows the process used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
If this process were to change, and wider socio-economic benefits were to be formally included, this could have unintended consequences. For example, it could have the effect of prioritising investment in vaccines for working populations over those who are not or will not be economically active. Additionally, the available data on socio-economic benefits is robust for only a small number of vaccines. Factoring this data into appraisals for only a small number of vaccines would create a bias for these programmes with better quality data. Conversely, if this data on wider benefits were to be factored into appraisals for all vaccination programmes, the use of lower quality data risks increasing uncertainty in appraisals and reduces our ability to ensure responsible and effective spending of public funds.
Asked by: Lord Weir of Ballyholme (Democratic Unionist Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what action they are taking to promote best practice in data collection and service standards for early identification and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government is strengthening best practice in cardiovascular disease prevention through CVDPREVENT, a national primary care audit that enables general practices (GPs) and primary care networks (PCNs) to extract data held by GPs to identify gaps in diagnosis, and management of people who are at risk of cardiovascular disease. The aim is to improve patient care, reduce inequalities, and optimise treatment.
Furthermore, this year, we will publish a new cardiovascular disease modern service framework (CVD MSF). The Department and NHS England are engaging widely with stakeholders to co-produce the CVD MSF, ensuring that experts, people, and communities are at the heart of its development. The CVD MSF will support evidence-led, consistent, high quality and equitable care whilst fostering innovation across the cardiovascular disease pathway.
Asked by: Laurence Turner (Labour - Birmingham Northfield)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 17 November 2025 to Question 86092, how many claimants were awarded a payment under the Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme in each financial year since 2021-22.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The NHS Business Services Authority is the administrator of the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS). The following table shows the total number of awarded claims in each financial year since 2021/22:
Year | Total number of VDPS claims awarded |
2021/22 | 1 |
2022/23 | 72 |
2023/24 | 99 |
2024/25 | 55 |
2025/26 | 34 |
Total | 261 |
Note: Data for 2025/26 figure is accurate as of 6 February 2026. The previous question, answered on 28 October 2025, covered the period up until 30 September 2025. Some claims may be paid in a different financial year to which they were awarded.
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help ensure that eligible women take up breast cancer screening in Sutton Coldfield constituency.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Through our National Health Service screening programmes, we can reduce mortality and morbidity from cancer in the population who appear healthy and have no symptoms, by detecting conditions at an earlier, more treatable stage. Each year, over 15 million people are invited for screening, with over 10 million taking up the invitation.
In Birmingham and Solihull, between 2022/23 and 2023/24 there has been an improvement of 4.93% in breast cancer screening uptake in 53 to 70 year old people.
In Sutton Coldfield, the breast screening is offered to all eligible cohorts in line with service specifications of the NHS Breast Screening Programme. In this constituency, uptake and coverage are stable and constituents can access screening at both static and mobile facilities. There is a dedicated focus on reducing health inequalities, supporting access, and informing eligible patients to actively take up their screening appointment and offer.
The breast screening service in Sutton Coldfield is currently undertaking a targeted text messaging initiative targeting eligible patients that have not attended their screening invitation. This includes the offer to rebook their screening appointment and a link to bilingual breast screening videos to support education and awareness. A follow-up text message survey is also being used to explore barriers to attendance and motivating factors, with insights informing ongoing service development.
Other initiatives to increase uptake in the area include:
a dedicated general practice toolkit to support and inform health promotion messaging;
a breast screening resource pack for care homes to support staff in promoting screening awareness and facilitating uptake amongst eligible residents; and
a cancer bus initiative promoting a range of services including breast cancer screening.
Asked by: Pippa Heylings (Liberal Democrat - South Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the provision of NHS treatment for Functional Neurological Disorder; and what steps he will take to resolve the disparities that currently exist between regions for the treatment of this condition.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England’s updated Specialised Neurology Service Specification, published in August 2025, includes specific reference to functional neurological disorder (FND). It states that all specialised neurology centres must include access to treatment services for FND. The updated Specialised Neurology Service Specification is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/specialised-neurology-services-adults/
There are a number of other national-level initiatives supporting service improvement and better care for patients with neurological conditions, including FND, such as the Getting It Right First Time Programme for Neurology and the Neurology Transformation Programme, which aim to improve care for people by reducing variation and delivering care more equitably across England.
Additionally, we have set up a UK Neuro Forum facilitating formal, which are twice-yearly meetings across the Department, NHS England, the devolved administrations and health services, and the Neurological Alliances of all four nations. The new forum brings key stakeholders together, to share learning across the system and to discuss challenges, best practice examples, and potential solutions for improving the care of people with neurological conditions, including FND.