Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the number of referral-to-treatment cases which will be taken off the main elective waiting list as a result of new guidance from NHS England.

Following the changes made to the national Referral to Treatment (RTT) reporting guidance on 2 February 2024, internal data from NHS England indicates that the impact on the overall RTT waiting list will be a decrease of approximately 37,000 pathways across National Health Service acute providers. These pathways are within the community paediatric specialty, which is the only specialty that is explicitly identified as being a community pathway in the NHS dataset.

Patient rights to treatment within 18 weeks for consultant led services will not change under this proposal and long waits will still be visible within the published statistics; they will simply appear in the community data and not RTT.