Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answers of 20 November to Questions 2738 and 2739 on Intensive Care: Hospital Beds and Hospital Beds respectively, if she will make a comparative estimate of the number of NHS acute hospital beds (a) available and (b) required in winter 2023-24; how many and what proportion of the 5,000 additional beds that were promised have been deployed; and what her planned timeframe is for the deployment of the remainder of the 5,000 beds in each constituency.

Published data from NHS England shows that there were 99,067 total general and acute (G&A) beds available in October 2023, including 96,781 core beds and 2,285 escalation beds.

Our Delivery Plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services set the ambition to increase the core G&A bed base by 5,000 permanent staffed beds in 2023/24 compared to planned levels for 2022/23. This would increase the number of core beds to 99,500. As of October, the National Health Service has delivered 2,281 additional core beds. NHS England continues to work with local systems and trusts to deliver this ambition this winter.

G&A bed numbers are expected to peak in January 2024 in response to expected demand. A breakdown of these additional beds by constituency is not available centrally.