Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent steps he has taken to ensure that foreign nationals pay for healthcare they receive in the UK.

The Department is working to support the National Health Service to increase the recovery of costs from overseas visitors and migrants. We aim to recover £500 million annually by the middle of the next Parliament, which will be reinvested into the NHS to support the sustainability of NHS frontline services.

The Department published its Implementation Plan on 14 July 2014 at:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/recovering-costs-of-nhs-healthcare-from-visitors-and-migrants

This sets out how the Department will improve the recovery rates from overseas visitors and migrants over the next year. It announced a number of measures to support these efforts but also laid the foundations for additional areas to be looked at as the programme progresses.

As part of the programme the Department is starting a programme of financial incentives to support the NHS in identifying chargeable visitors and migrants using the NHS. These incentives recognise the administrative and financial burdens that can face NHS trusts in the recovery process and aim to counter balance these. The implementation plan provides the full detail of these schemes.