Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether point 2.33 on the use of minimum waits in his Department's Operating Framework for the NHS in England 2012-13 is still Government policy.

The NHS Operating Framework for 2012/13 that the Department published in November 2011 is no longer current. NHS Operating Planning and Contracting Guidance for 2017-19 is the current operating guidance. Patients are treated based on clinical assessment of priority.

There are two waiting times rights within the NHS Constitution. The first outlines that patients have a right to start consultant-led treatment within a maximum of 18 weeks from referral for non-urgent conditions. If this is not possible, the clinical commissioning group or NHS England, which commissions and funds treatment, must take all reasonable steps to offer a suitable alternative provider, or if there is more than one, a range of suitable providers, that would be able to see or treat the patient more quickly than the provider to which they were referred. The second is that 93% of patients to have a maximum two week wait from urgent general practitioner referrals where cancer is suspected.