Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help ensure the NHS meets the 10.3 per cent annual growth in treatment volumes required over the next two years to meet the elective recovery targets by 2025.

To support elective recovery, the Government plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25, in addition to the £2 billion Elective Recovery Fund, to help drive up and protect elective activity. As part of the Autumn Statement 2022, the Government announced an additional £3.3 billion for 2023/24 and 2024/25 to support the National Health Service in England, enabling rapid action to improve emergency, elective and primary care performance towards pre-pandemic levels. Taken together, this funding could deliver the equivalent of around nine million more checks and procedures and will mean that the NHS in England can aim to deliver around 30% more elective activity by 2024/25 than before the pandemic.

The Government has now moved its focus to cutting waits of 65 weeks or more to as near zero as possible by March 2024. To help achieve this goal, we are taking a range of actions to maximise our productivity and capacity. This includes work to reduce outpatient follow-ups by 25%, expanding community diagnostic centres, increasing surgical capacity through surgical hubs, giving patients greater choice through a national hub model, and the development of the Independent Sector Provider offer to patients.