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Care Homes

The hon. Gentleman has made an excellent point about nutrition and malnutrition, and he is well aware of how keenly I follow the issue. I am concerned as to whether the Government have had a chance to uprate their performance in producing statistics and to monitor the situation, because the issue has effectively been unnoticed by them for more than a couple of years. More recently, their publication of statistics was delayed and, although we have now managed to extract them, they did not come via the normal parliamentary channels. There is deep concern about malnutrition becoming a head-in-the-sand issue, rather than something that we should tackle now.