Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what comparative assessment he has made of the level of productivity in the NHS in (a) October 2020 and (b) January 2020.

Since 2007, productivity in the National Health Service has outperformed the wider economy, growing at an average of 1% a year. In 2018/19, we believe that NHS productivity grew at 2.3%, greater than its 1.1% target.

However, we expect that NHS productivity will have fallen considerably in 2020/21 because of increased spending on the COVID-19 response and due to reductions in elective and non-elective admissions to prevent further infections in hospitals. Data collection and assessment of the NHS against Financial Test 2 to achieve 1.1% productivity growth was also paused due to COVID-19.

The latest independent figures on NHS productivity from the University of York and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), for the 2017/18 financial year, show that productivity grew by between 0.7% (ONS estimate) and 1.3% (University of York estimate).