Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) reduce national waiting times for GP appointments and (b) increase the number of GPs.

We have made £520 million available to improve access and expand general practice capacity during the pandemic. This is in addition to £1.5 billion announced in 2020 to create an additional 50 million general practice appointments by 2024. In April 2022 45.2% of appointments took place on the same day as the booking was made, with 72.8% taking place within seven days. We have also put in place a short-term solution to assist practices to provide additional capacity to respond to telephone calls from patients, while a long-term approach is developed.

We are working with NHS England and NHS Improvement, Health Education England and the profession to increase recruitment, address the reasons why doctors leave the profession and encourage them to return to practice. In March 2022, there were 1,462 more full-time equivalent doctors in general practice compared to March 2019.