The Neonatal Behavioural Assessment Scale (NBAS) and Newborn Behavioural Observations (NBO) are tools used to observe newborn behaviour. The NBAS is a more detailed assessment, while the NBO is more commonly used to support parent-infant relationships by helping parents understand their baby’s cues, communication, and capabilities.

The evidence base is small and of limited quality, although it suggests potential benefits for parental confidence, responsiveness, and early bonding. A Cochrane review concluded that further research is needed before wider recommendation.

It is for individual National Health Service trusts to decide whether staff should use and be trained in these tools, therefore no assessment has been made of their use within the NHS.

The information requested is not currently available. We expect to be able to publish this data in Autumn 2026. This will be a new publication in response to the Government’s commitment to strengthening Health Visiting and will report on the zero to 19 year old public health nursing workforce size and activities.

We understand the importance of parent-infant relationships on a baby’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. That is why we are committed to improving parent-infant relationship support.

Health visiting services provide parenting support to all families through the national Healthy Child Programme, funded through the Public Health Grant. This includes advice on parent-infant relationships as well as responsive parenting, infant behaviour, and wider support as needed. The Department is collecting the number of local authorities that provide parenting and behaviour services, with publication planned for Autumn 2026.

Through Healthy Babies, we are investing £109 million to provide enhanced parent-infant relationship support in 75 local authorities areas with high levels of deprivation. Through our management information data, we know that in March 2025, there were 520 fully or partially funded parent-infant relationship and perinatal mental health services across the funded local authorities. Further information is available at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69f1cebdb8ce27acfa0967ff/Family_Hubs_and_Start_for_Life_Management_Information__August_2022_to_March_2025_.pdf

We are working to expand our data collection, and, from April 2026, we have been asking all 153 local authorities to report on services delivered through the Best Start Family Hub network.

We are also investing in independent evaluation of Healthy Babies to understand which interventions and delivery elements have an impact, for whom, and in what contexts.

We understand the importance of parent-infant relationships on a baby’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. That is why we are committed to improving parent-infant relationship support.

Health visiting services provide parenting support to all families through the national Healthy Child Programme, funded through the Public Health Grant. This includes advice on parent-infant relationships as well as responsive parenting, infant behaviour, and wider support as needed. The Department is collecting the number of local authorities that provide parenting and behaviour services, with publication planned for Autumn 2026.

Through Healthy Babies, we are investing £109 million to provide enhanced parent-infant relationship support in 75 local authorities areas with high levels of deprivation. Through our management information data, we know that in March 2025, there were 520 fully or partially funded parent-infant relationship and perinatal mental health services across the funded local authorities. Further information is available at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69f1cebdb8ce27acfa0967ff/Family_Hubs_and_Start_for_Life_Management_Information__August_2022_to_March_2025_.pdf

We are working to expand our data collection, and, from April 2026, we have been asking all 153 local authorities to report on services delivered through the Best Start Family Hub network.

We are also investing in independent evaluation of Healthy Babies to understand which interventions and delivery elements have an impact, for whom, and in what contexts.

We understand the importance of parent-infant relationships on a baby’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. That is why we are committed to improving parent-infant relationship support.

Health visiting services provide parenting support to all families through the national Healthy Child Programme, funded through the Public Health Grant. This includes advice on parent-infant relationships as well as responsive parenting, infant behaviour, and wider support as needed. The Department is collecting the number of local authorities that provide parenting and behaviour services, with publication planned for Autumn 2026.

Through Healthy Babies, we are investing £109 million to provide enhanced parent-infant relationship support in 75 local authorities areas with high levels of deprivation. Through our management information data, we know that in March 2025, there were 520 fully or partially funded parent-infant relationship and perinatal mental health services across the funded local authorities. Further information is available at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69f1cebdb8ce27acfa0967ff/Family_Hubs_and_Start_for_Life_Management_Information__August_2022_to_March_2025_.pdf

We are working to expand our data collection, and, from April 2026, we have been asking all 153 local authorities to report on services delivered through the Best Start Family Hub network.

We are also investing in independent evaluation of Healthy Babies to understand which interventions and delivery elements have an impact, for whom, and in what contexts.

We understand the importance of parent-infant relationships on a baby’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. That is why we are committed to improving parent-infant relationship support.

Through Healthy Babies, we are investing £109 million in 75 local authorities in areas with high levels of deprivation to enhance parent-infant relationship support. In March 2026 we published guidance to local authorities setting out our expectations for how this funding should be used. The expectations have a particular focus on providing information and advice, building workforce capability and capacity, joining up support locally, as well as providing easy access to high quality, evidence-based services and support. The guidance also sets ambitions for those local authorities not receiving Healthy Babies funding to build the foundations for this provision where possible.

The Department has recently refreshed the Healthy Child Programme Guidance for practitioners, providers, and local authorities, which includes the importance of providing support in the transition to parenthood, including evidence-based parent-infant relationship support. Transition to parenthood is one of the six high impact areas for health visiting.

In addition, NHS England routinely identifies and disseminates best practice and learning across National Health Services and clinical networks to support local delivery of parent-infant relationship support.

The National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, will translate the recommendations of Baroness Amos’ independent investigation into National Health Service maternity and neonatal care into a national action plan. The investigation’s final report will be published in June. While its final recommendations cannot be pre-empted, the taskforce’s terms of reference state that all aspects of maternity and neonatal care will be considered when developing its national action plan.

More widely, we are investing £200 million into the Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies programme to strengthen Healthy Babies support in the critical 1,001 days, giving families access to enhanced perinatal mental health, parent-infant relationship, and infant feeding services, to help build the foundations for every baby’s emotional, social, and cognitive development.

On improving neonatal outreach, the NHS England Improving Postnatal Care Toolkit, published in January 2026 and available on the NHS.UK website, helps integrated care boards and local trusts optimise maternal and infant health. It requires commissioners to integrate neonatal and community care, reduce health inequalities, and recommends robust clinical handovers between neonatal units and local general practices and health visiting.

What steps his Department is taking to improve the provision of NHS health visitors.

I thank my hon. Friend for being so brave and willing to share his and his wife’s birth trauma, and to talk about the lack of support afterwards, not just with Baroness Amos and her review but with the House today. I know personally how hard it is to do that, but I also know the huge difference it can make to Government policy. I am happy to commit to him today that the Government will absolutely look closely at all the findings in Baroness Amos’s review, and work with the national maternity taskforce to translate the recommendations into action. I am also pleased to confirm that we have recently updated our national health visiting guidance to include a high impact area on family mental health, with a clear focus on supporting both mothers and fathers.

I recently gave evidence to Baroness Amos’s national maternity inquiry, sharing the trauma that my wife and I endured. Even as she carried her own burden after the birth, she was my rock, but the NHS was not. I was invisible. No one asked about me and I was left to carry it alone for months. Will the Minister please ensure that health visitors recognise dads and other non-birthing partners, check in on their mental health, and help them to access support so that no more dads are forgotten when families need them the most?

Yes, I will. We are busy working on the 10-year workforce plan. The training of all the NHS workforce, including health visitors, is a big part of that. In my new position as public health and prevention Minister, I am particularly interested in the work of health visitors, especially with regard to supporting rates of breastfeeding. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the results of the breastfeeding survey were released last week and they showed substantial improvement.

It is not just the number of health visitors that needs to be improved. Women report to me that they have skipped appointments due to negative experiences with health visitors, especially around breastfeeding. Will the Minister commit to improving the training of health visitors, so that women receive the best quality care?

Health visitors play a vital role in supporting babies, children and families. Under the previous Government, the number of health visitors fell significantly, which is why this Government have taken action. The upcoming professional strategy for nursing and midwifery will set out a bold direction of travel to strengthen health visiting across England. We have already made improvements with all post-birth health and development reviews now completed for over 80% of children nationally, which is the highest level since recording began.

Families in England must be offered at least five health visits, led by a qualified health visitor who is a specialist community public health nurse, with additional support arranged based on identified needs. Local, regional and national health visiting service delivery data is published annually on GOV.UK.

According to the 2024-2025 annual data, which is the latest available, a higher percentage of children in Lincolnshire received a six-to-eight-week health visit and a 12-month health visit than the national average. Meanwhile, the number of children in Lincolnshire who received a 2-2½-year health visit was 3% lower than the national average. The percentage of infants in Lincolnshire who received a new birth health visit within 30 days of birth did not significantly differ from the national average. The relevant dataset and statistical commentary is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/health-visitor-service-delivery-data-for-2024-to-2025

In line with the Government’s commitment to strengthening health visiting, in February 2026, we refreshed the guidance for the Healthy Child Programme, which specifies requirements for health visiting services, to promote national consistency in service delivery. We are working closely with regional colleagues to support the implementation of this guidance across the country.

The Public Health Grant supports local authorities to deliver their public health responsibilities and commission front-line public health services, such as health visiting and other children’s public health services. The grant is ring-fenced to ensure it is spent on public health functions, but local authorities have flexibility to respond to the specific needs of their communities and deliver appropriate public health services.

Local authorities are responsible for deciding how to spend their grant, ensuring that all expenditure complies with conditions set out in the public health grant circular. Local authorities’ compliance with grant conditions is assured by the Department. Local authorities must report their public health expenditure annually, and reporting categories include prescribed children’s zero to five years old services. Each director of public health and senior finance officer must also provide an annual assurance statement confirming that the grant has been spent in line with the conditions set. The Department has issued healthy child programme guidance, which specifies standards and delivery expectations for health visiting, and this has recently been refreshed to strengthen service delivery and promote national consistency in service quality.

The Department has published expected Public Health Grant allocations for the next three years.