Asked by: Callum Anderson (Labour - Buckingham and Bletchley)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans his Department has to issue guidance to councils covering Buckingham and Bletchley constituency on monitoring local outcomes of the Child Poverty Strategy.
Answered by Diana Johnson - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
We are strengthening our partnership with the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector (VCSE) with our Civil Society Covenant. We recognise that the VCSE sector has a strong record of supporting families and is the bedrock of our communities.
We are putting tackling child poverty at the heart of local government by including child poverty in the new Outcomes Framework for local government as a contextual outcome. The Framework also includes wider priority outcomes that will help tackle child poverty such as preventing and reducing homelessness and rough sleeping; access to a decent, safe and affordable home; local growth; and promoting health and wellbeing in children.
Alongside the Strategy, we have set out our initial plans for monitoring and evaluation to ensure our strategy is on track to tackle child poverty as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, accountability, and continued learning.
Asked by: Saqib Bhatti (Conservative - Meriden and Solihull East)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what recent assessment has her Department made of the potential impact of employer National Insurance Contribution increases in the financial year 2025/2026 on a) the charity sector and b) neurorehabilitation service providing charities.
Answered by Stephanie Peacock - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
This government recognises the vital role that charitable organisations and community groups play in providing crucial support to families and individuals across the country. These organisations, as well as the wider voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector, are integral to the Government’s vision for national renewal and delivery of the five national missions.
DCMS Ministers have met with representatives from the VCSE sector and are aware of their concerns about changes to National Insurance Contributions (NICs). We recognise the need to protect the smallest businesses and charities, which is why we more than doubled the Employment Allowance to £10,500, meaning that more than half of businesses (including charities) with NICs liabilities will either gain or see no change in 2025/26.
The UK continues to have one of the most generous charity tax regimes in the world. More than £6 billion in charitable reliefs were provided to charities, community amateur sports clubs and their donors last year.
In January 2025, NHS England published Standardising community health services which outlines the core community health services that integrated care boards (ICBs) should consider when planning services for their local population. Community rehabilitation for people with neurological conditions is named as one of the ICB-funded core components of community health services.
Asked by: Luke Evans (Conservative - Hinckley and Bosworth)
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 ensure that the patterns of social engagement by young men about issues concerning (a) anabolic steroids and (b) image and performance enhancing drugs are captured as part of improving men's health literacy.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
On 19 November 2025, to coincide with International Men’s Health Day, we published the first ever Men’s Health Strategy for England. The strategy includes tangible actions to improve access to healthcare, provide the right support to enable men to make healthier choices, develop healthy living and working conditions, foster strong social, community, and family networks, and address societal norms. It also considers how to prevent and tackle the biggest health problems affecting men of all ages, which include mental health and suicide prevention, respiratory illness, prostate cancer, and heart disease.
We are taking a range of actions to improve men’s health literacy. For example, our landmark partnership with the Premier League will bring together football clubs and the Government to improve health literacy, particularly around mental health and suicide prevention. We are also ensuring health literacy improvements are embedded at the community level, building the evidence base on heath literacy in men, and identifying ways to build media literacy skills in men to help them critically assess health information and protect against misinformation that harms health.
We will consider the impacts on young men in the implementation of the strategy. The strategy sets up a strong foundation for improving how we think and act on men's health and we will learn, iterate, and adapt as new challenges emerge. As a first step, we will work with the Men's Health Academic Network and the voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector to develop and publish a one-year-on report, highlighting the improvements made and where future efforts will need to be targeted.
Asked by: Al Pinkerton (Liberal Democrat - Surrey Heath)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of health services for men in Surrey Heath constituency.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We know that we need to do more to improve health outcomes for men across the country, including men in Surrey Heath. On 19 November, to coincide with International Men’s Health Day, we published the Men’s Health Strategy which aims to improve the health of all men and boys in England. The strategy includes tangible actions to improve access to healthcare, provide the right support to enable men to make healthier choices, develop healthy living and working conditions, foster strong social, community and family networks, and address societal norms. It also considers how to prevent and tackle the biggest health problems affecting men of all ages, which include mental health and suicide prevention, respiratory illness, prostate cancer, and heart disease.
This strategy is a crucial first step, laying the foundation from which we can learn, iterate and grow to create a society where all men and boys are supported to live longer, healthier and happier lives. As a first step, we will work with the Men’s Health Academic Network and voluntary, community and social enterprise sector to develop and publish a one-year-on report, highlighting the improvements made and where future efforts will need to be targeted.
Asked by: Oliver Ryan (Labour (Co-op) - Burnley)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment his Department has made of the safeguarding implications for children who have a parent in prison; and whether he plans to introduce a national statutory mechanism to identify those children, including a requirement for prisons and probation services to notify local authorities and schools when a parent is incarcerated.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
We recognise that more can be done to ensure children with a parent in prison are identified so that they get the support they need. This is why the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education are working together to determine the best mechanism to identify these children.
We will continue to engage with those with those who have direct experience of having a parent in prison and with the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector to inform our approach. For example, 25 November marked the first-ever National Day to recognise children with a parent in prison. This provided a powerful opportunity for Ministers and officials from both Departments to attend a conference hosted by the charity Children Heard and Seen to hear directly from children and young people with lived experience of parental imprisonment. This demonstrates our commitment to putting children’s voices at the heart of our policymaking.
HMPPS has a statutory duty under section 11 of the Children Act (2004) to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. HMPPS staff are required to check if prisoners received into custody have caring responsibilities for any children, to make enquiries with children’s services and record known safeguarding concerns. HMPPS works in partnership with police forces, children’s services and other relevant agencies to fulfil its safeguarding responsibilities. Where HMPPS professionals are concerned about the welfare of a child of a prisoner, they must consider whether a referral to local authority children’s social care is required and should always refer immediately if there is a concern that the child is suffering, or likely to, suffer significant harm. Additionally, HMPPS provides a comprehensive range of staff training and learning opportunities for staff, including an annual “Think Child” campaign, aimed at promoting children’s safety.
Asked by: James McMurdock (Independent - South Basildon and East Thurrock)
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 reduce short-term readmissions following mental health inpatient discharge.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
In 2023, NHS England published guidance on the commissioning and delivery of acute inpatient mental health care for adults and older adults, which is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/acute-inpatient-mental-health-care-for-adults-and-older-adults/
This encourages integrated care boards and mental health providers to monitor the length of hospital stay, the number of people who are clinically ready for discharge and who have not been discharged, reasons for delayed discharges, and reasons for readmission within six months, in order to monitor the effectiveness of local discharge arrangements and to identify improvements.
NHS England is also delivering a universal culture of care improvement programme, which all National Health Service and major independent providers are participating in. The programme is based on co-produced standards for high quality inpatient care, which include commitments to improve discharge and follow up support.
Improving access to high quality community mental health care is critical to reducing the number of avoidable admissions to hospital and supporting people in community settings following a hospital spell. Since 2019, NHS England has invested significant additional funding to support services to transform and expand services in line with the vision set out in the Community Mental Health Framework. The new approach integrates community mental health services with primary care, whilst also improving partnerships with voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations, local authorities, and other local organisations to offer people holistic and personalised care for both their clinical and social needs, with both a ‘need-led’ and ‘no wrong door’ approach.
NHS England continues to prioritise improving services for people with mental health problems, including through the development of new guidance on delivering personalised care and support, for instance the Personalised Care Framework: a Modern Care Programme Approach, the piloting and rollout of 24/7 Neighbourhood Mental Health Centres across the country, and the development of a new modern service framework for severe mental illness expected in 2026.
Asked by: Lee Dillon (Liberal Democrat - Newbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the Government will publish its guidance to local authorities on Neighbourhood Health Plans.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Neighbourhood health will move care out of hospitals and into communities, with more personalised, proactive, and integrated services starting from where and how people live their lives. This will involve building stronger links to wider local government services such as housing, family hubs, and programmes such as Pride in Place, as well as links with wider civil society including the voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector.
The Planning Framework for the NHS in England, published on 8 September, reiterates the commitment in the 10-Year Health Plan, that place partners develop a local neighbourhood plan, which integrated care boards will bring together into a population health improvement plan. These local plans will be drawn up by local government, the National Health Service, and its partners at single or upper tier local authority level under the leadership of the Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs).
We will be publishing further guidance to support local areas to develop neighbourhood health plans in due course. This will set out how the NHS, local authorities, and partners should work together under the leadership of HWBs to develop and implement plans.
Asked by: Andrew Snowden (Conservative - Fylde)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve (a) early detection and (b) surveillance of antibiotic-resistant infections.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Unified Infection Dataset (UID) supports early detection of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through epidemiological outputs, infectious disease surveillance, outbreak response, and allied research with rich linked data. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has developed innovative analytical tools for large datasets via the UID and the Enterprise Data Analytics Platform (EDAP). AMR-related data continues to be ingested into the EDAP, including:
The EDAP aims to deliver a strategic platform for data enrichment, data analytics, and data science for AMR and HCAI and will support streamlined and timely surveillance outputs to tackle AMR and improve public health.
The UKHSA’s Porton AMR network leads on the discovery and development of novel antimicrobials, optimising antibiotic combinations, vaccines, and non-traditional therapies. The UKHSA is also working on advancing AMR typing and whole genome sequencing reference laboratory services and providing clinical advice to support NHS England front line services dealing with AMR associated infections.
NHS England is streamlining diagnostic innovation through the cross-sector ‘Moving Forwards Infection Diagnostics’ events series. Engagement will inform an ‘infection diagnostics framework’ by 2027 and identify target product profiles for diagnostics needed in the National Health Service. A rapid review pipeline to identify optimal tests within the market and assess how existing diagnostics can be optimised is also being produced. These winter ‘Point of Care Testing’ pilots have been funded to further build the evidence base.
Asked by: Mary Glindon (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that Integrated Care Boards support improved early identification of young carers.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) are currently supporting a cross-Government project, in collaboration with the Department for Education (DfE), which looks at the inequitable experience of and outcomes for young carers in both health and education. This project, co-produced with young carers, other Government departments and voluntary sector organisations, aims to improve rates of identification of young carers and improve pathways of support in a joined-up approach across schools, health services and local Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations.
Additionally, I have established, and now chair, a regular cross-Government meeting of ministers from DHSC, DfE, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business and Trade to drive coordinated action and to ensure unpaid carers receive the recognition and support they deserve.
Early next month NHS England will be hosting an engagement workshop led by their patient and public voice partners, to hear directly about the challenges facing young carers. Their feedback will inform a Young Carers Cross-Government Summit, due to be held in November, to help develop improved approaches across the system.
Asked by: Neil Duncan-Jordan (Labour - Poole)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what will the NHS offline alternative consist of for people who are digitally excluded, in the context of NHS digitalisation.
Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Patients who prefer face-to-face appointments in physical settings will continue to access care through their local National Health Service provider. This is about expanding choice, not replacing traditional services.
We will be working with marginalised groups, including through the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise Health and Wellbeing Alliance that represents communities who share protected characteristics or that experience health inequalities. Inclusion will be a core priority as the organisation evolves.