Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the current levels of funding within the NHS for wheelchair provision for outpatients.

Wheelchair services are the responsibility of local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). No information is currently held centrally about CCGs’ expenditure on wheelchair services or the level of service that they provide, including information about access and patient experience, that would enable the transparent assessment and benchmarking of provision for outpatients.

NHS England has recently established a new national wheelchair dataset, which went live from 1 July. This will enable the use of data in future to drive improvement in wheelchair services.