The Health Bill is a Government Bill introduced in the House of Commons on 14 May 2026. It is currently at the early Commons stage, with Second Reading scheduled for Monday 1 June 2026. After that it would move through Committee, Report and Third Reading in the Commons, then repeat similar stages in the Lords before any final amendments and Royal Assent.

The Bill’s broad purpose is to provide the legislative framework for a major NHS restructuring and modernisation programme. In headline terms, it aims to enable the Single Patient Record, abolish NHS England and transfer functions to DHSC, the Secretary of State and Integrated Care Boards, implement parts of the Dash Review on patient safety and patient voice, and clarify the role of ICBs and providers.

For CASPA members, the key point is that this is not just an NHS structural Bill. It explicitly covers health and social care, and the Single Patient Record proposals refer to bringing together health and social care records in one place.

Implications for social care technology

The most important technology measure is the Single Patient Record. The Government’s stated ambition is that people should no longer have fragmented records across GP, hospital, community, mental health and social care settings. The Bill would create the primary legal framework for the SPR, allowing patient information from existing separate sources to be brought together and made available to patients and relevant health and care providers involved in direct care.

The Bill would allow the Secretary of State to set out, through regulations, who can and must share data with the SPR, who can access it, and how the system will be enforced. This is likely to be one of the most important areas for CASPA to monitor, because the detail will probably sit in secondary legislation, standards and implementation guidance rather than on the face of the Bill.

The Government says the SPR will not create a new legal gateway for secondary uses such as planning, commissioning or research. Instead, SPR data could only be used for those purposes where there is already a separate legal basis. That distinction will matter for public trust and for suppliers designing consent, audit and governance workflows.

Timelines and rollout

The stated ambition is that clinicians will have improved access to records for at least 80% of patients by March 2027 through the connection of existing shared care records. From 2028, the ambition is that all patients in England will have access to a core set of their data through the SPR, viewable securely through the NHS App. The first priority pathways will be maternity and frailty, with additional pathways such as cancer and mental health expected over the following two years. The longer-term goal is that by 2030 the whole population of England will have access to the full range of data through the SPR.

The inclusion of frailty as an early pathway is particularly relevant to adult social care, care homes, domiciliary care and care technology suppliers. It suggests that social care data, observations and care planning information could become increasingly important to NHS-facing digital infrastructure, rather than sitting outside it.

Data connectivity and interoperability

The Bill sits within a wider policy shift from analogue to digital, hospital to community, and treatment to prevention. The data and digital functions currently exercised by NHS England would transfer to the Secretary of State, exercised through the restructured DHSC. These functions include national data collections, analysis and publication of data, and operation of essential national systems such as the NHS App, NHS Spine and Personal Demographics Service.

The Government also says the Bill will allow information systems to be established and operated where appropriate in the interests of the health service or recipients and providers of adult social care in England. Others, including health and care bodies, would be able to request that the Secretary of State establishes and operates an information system.

The Bill updates the language around information systems from “collection and analysis” to “processing”, aligning with UK GDPR terminology and explicitly covering activities such as retrieval and storage. The Government says this better reflects current practice and provides more flexibility, including in relation to future use of artificial intelligence, while maintaining strict rules on access, use and security.

For suppliers, the likely direction of travel is clearer: systems will need to be interoperable, capable of meeting national information standards, able to support secure data sharing, and designed with robust role-based access, auditability and data-quality controls.

What the Government says about the supplier model

The SPR is expected, wherever possible, to build on and connect with existing health and care source systems, such as electronic patient records and shared care records, rather than replacing them. The Government also says it will be delivered through contracts with multiple suppliers, with no single supplier dominating, and that no supplier decisions have yet been made.

That is positive in principle for the supplier ecosystem, but CASPA will continue to test what “multiple suppliers” means in practice and how this fits with the SCIP programme.

Wider system changes to note

Beyond the SPR, the Bill would abolish NHS England and transfer many functions into DHSC, the Secretary of State, ICBs or other public bodies. It would make ICBs more clearly strategic commissioners, transfer most primary care commissioning functions to ICBs, and simplify local planning by removing the legal requirement for integrated care partnerships and replacing existing planning structures with new arrangements around JSNAs, Neighbourhood Health Plans and Population Health Improvement Plans.

It also proposes changes to patient voice and patient safety structures, including abolishing Healthwatch England and local Healthwatch, moving local Healthwatch functions into ICB and local authority engagement functions, and transferring HSSIB functions to the CQC.

CASPA Member Briefing: Health Bill Second Reading