Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what recent assessment they have made of the role of insourcing as a solution to eliminating waiting list backlogs for elective procedures.

Independent sector providers have a significant role to play in supporting the National Health Service as trusted partners, to recover elective services. The Elective Recovery Taskforce was launched in 2022 to consider how capacity across the system could be best utilised, including how insourcing could be used to meet the ambitions on long waits. The taskforce concluded its work by publishing an implementation plan in August 2023, which sets out a series of actions that have either been delivered, or will be delivered, over the coming months.

Local systems are best placed to consider how to utilise insourcing as part of their delivery plans, in a way which works for their areas. To support the system, NHS England produced Guidance for trusts on the use of insourcing and NHS Shared Business Services produced the Insourcing of Clinical Services Framework Agreement.