Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many children are on the waiting list for tonsillectomy; and how many of those have been waiting for (a) under one year, (b) two years, (c) three years, (d) four years and (e) over five years.

The Government has committed to returning to the NHS Constitutional standard that 92% of all patients wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment for consultant-led care, including children who require a tonsillectomy. As a first step towards this, we have now exceeded our pledge to deliver an extra two million operations, scans, and appointments across elective services, having now delivered over three million more.

There were 11,091 cases where a child was waiting for tonsillectomy as of 11 May 2025. Of those, in 9,205 cases the child had been waiting under one year and in 1,886 cases the child had been waiting between one and two years. There were no cases where a child had been waiting more than two years.