Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to his Department's policy paper entitled 10 Year Health Plan for England: fit for the future, published on 3 July 2025, if he will publish his Department’s assumptions of NHS productivity increases for the reduction in projected staff numbers in 2035 compared to the 2023 Long-Term Workforce Plan.

We will publish our 10 Year Workforce Plan by the end of this year. The plan will set out the workforce needed to deliver the transformed service, and the key assumptions used in determining that workforce. That plan will set out assumptions about productivity used in determining projected staff numbers.

The approach set out in our 10-Year Health plan means that we will need a very different kind of workforce strategy. Instead of asking ‘how many staff do we need to maintain our current care model over the next 10 years?’, our new 10 Year Workforce Plan will ask ‘given our reform plan, what workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed, and what skills should they have?’