Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve the (a) quality and (b) provision of NHS wheelchairs.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services. It is therefore the responsibility of ICBs to review and assess the quality of the provision of their commissioned National Health Service wheelchair services.

NHS England supports ICBs to commission effective, efficient and personalised wheelchair services. Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from clinical commissioning groups, now ICBs, on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required.

NHS England is taking steps to reduce regional variation in the quality and provision of NHS wheelchairs, and to support ICBs to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment. This includes publishing a Wheelchair Quality Framework on 9 April 2025 which sets out quality standards and statutory requirements for ICBs, such as offering personal wheelchair budgets. The framework is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/wheelchair-quality-framework/