Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the press release entitled Crack teams get patients off waiting lists at twice the speed, published on 16 March 2025, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of sending doctors into areas of highest economic inactivity on waiting lists in areas from which the doctors were seconded.

No assessment is currently planned regarding the potential impact of sending doctors into areas with the highest economic inactivity on waiting lists in the areas from which the doctors were seconded.

As set out in the Elective Reform Plan, we continue to target waiting list performance across the country, so that 92% of patients return to waiting no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment by March 2029. In March 2025, performance against this standard was 59.8%, 2.6% higher than a year earlier.

The Further Faster 20 programme is supporting these efforts by ensuring that this improvement is seen in areas that can benefit the most. The positive progress made from October 2024 to March 2025, with waiting lists across these areas being reduced by over 57,000, means that almost half, specifically 47.9%, of the national reduction in the overall waiting list between those months has come from the 20 hospitals involved in the scheme.