Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will allocate additional resources to NHS Trusts to help tackle the backlog of outpatient appointments, day care treatments and surgery that has resulted from the covid-19 outbreak; and what plans he has to tackle that backlog.

Whilst routine treatments were suspended to provide capacity to treat COVID-19 patients, we are now working closely with the National Health Service and other partners to restart these in a safe way. Guidance has already been issued on this, and approaches are being tailored at local level according to local capacity and local demand, with the most urgent services being restarted first. Guidance also outlines that contracted independent sector hospital and diagnostic capacity should also be used in the restarting of routine electives.

We are committed to ensuring the NHS has the funding and support it needs to respond to the crisis.