Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of trends in the number of year-on-year changes to hospital handover delays in (a) Shropshire (b) West Midlands and (c) England.

Shropshire is primarily served by the West Midlands Ambulance Service, along with the wider West Midlands region, where in January 2026 average hospital handovers took one hour, 20 minutes and 15 seconds, which is worse than the same period the year before.

For England overall, the most recent National Health Service performance figures show that average ambulance handover delays have improved, falling to 37 minutes 39 seconds from 40 minutes 23 seconds, an improvement of over two and a half minutes from the same period last year.

From 2023, NHS England has published data on hospital handover delays at acute and ambulance trust level. There is no published data on individual hospital handover times publicly available, so the Deptartment is unable to list the longest hospital handover times recorded. However, the 90th centile of handovers times are published monthly. The data can be found at the following two links:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mi-nhse-ambulance-handover-times-by-acute-trust

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ambulance-quality-indicators/ambulance-quality-indicators-data-2025-26/