Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of state for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of waiting times to access NHS specialised gender services in the North East.

NHS England has launched an ambitious programme to tackle waiting times, overseen by a Programme Board for Gender Identity Services. NHS England agreed new service specifications for gender dysphoria services in 2018 following a process of extensive stakeholder engagement and public consultation.

In April 2019 NHS England began a process of national procurement that will determine which organisations are best able to deliver specialist gender services in the future against the new service specifications, and this process is open to new providers. NHS England has also announced plans to establish for evaluation new gender services in primary care settings and other community care settings which if positively evaluated could be rolled out nationally, thereby helping to increase clinical capacity.