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 support trusts to reduce bed occupancy to below 80% ahead of winter 2025-26.

The National Health Service is already preparing for winter this year with the development and testing of winter plans. This includes the surge capacity and escalation plans in place across all NHS and urgent care services.

The Urgent and Emergency Care Plan 2025/26 focuses on improvements that will see the biggest impact on urgent and emergency care performance this winter, including working to reduce bed occupancy by avoiding unnecessary admissions and reducing delays to discharge.

To help avoid unnecessary admissions, the NHS is expanding Same Day Emergency Care, virtual wards, and urgent community response services so patients can receive timely care closer to home.

Where people are admitted to hospital, trusts are asked to reduce the average length of stay for patients requiring an overnight emergency admission by at least 0.4 days. This includes reducing discharge delays, working with local authorities and integrated care boards to progressively eliminate the longest and most unacceptable discharge delays, starting with the 0.7% of patients who wait more than 21 days beyond their discharge ready date, and eliminating any internal delays to discharge of more than 48 hours.