Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to roll out further Clinical Diagnostic Centres.

Approximately £1.5 billion of additional capital funding has been allocated in the budget for 2025/26, to support National Health Service performance across secondary and emergency care, and to begin to deliver against the Government's three strategic shifts, which include moving care from the hospital to the community.

This investment will deliver new surgical hubs and diagnostic scanners. This creates new capacity for over 30,000 additional procedures, and over 1.25 million diagnostic tests, as they come online. The investments made at the October Budget also add new beds across the NHS estate.

Collectively, these investments will create more treatment space in emergency departments, reduce waiting times, and help shift more care into the community via the expansion of community based diagnostic capacity. More details will follow at the earliest opportunity.

The NHS is prioritising the roll-out of additional diagnostic capacity, and is currently delivering the final year of the three-year investment plan for establishing Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs), with capacity prioritised for cancer diagnostics. In August 2024, NHS England published an updated list of 168 CDC sites currently delivering activity. A total of 170 CDCs have been approved and will be delivering activity by March 2025.