Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average time taken to diagnose multiple sclerosis was in each of the last five years.

We do not hold data in the format requested. The latest data for referral to treatment waiting times in England, from January 2025, shows there were under 233,000 pathways waiting for a neurology appointment, 53.8% of which had been waiting less that 18 weeks.

On 6 January 2025, NHS England published the new Elective Reform Plan, which sets out a whole system approach to hitting the 18-week referral to treatment target by the end of this Parliament. We have delivered an additional two million appointments between July and November 2024, compared to the same period in 2023, seven months ahead of schedule, as a first step in our commitment to ensuring that patients can expect to be treated within 18 weeks. These additional appointments have taken place across a number of specialities, including neurology.