Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what is the overall budget of NHS England, how many staff it has, and how it measures its own performance in driving the delivery of services in primary and secondary care.

The overall budget for NHS England in 2023/24 is £172.1 billion. NHS England publishes quarterly data on the number of staff working in National Health Service Support Organisations and Central Bodies. The latest data for June 2023 shows there are 16,328 full time equivalent staff employed by NHS England.

In May 2023, NHS England published a delivery plan for primary care. Integrated care boards (ICBs) will lead the change for their local health systems as commissioners of primary care. The plan sets out how ICBs are expected to report progress, including though their public board reporting, with national and regional support being offered to any ICBs that are falling behind. A copy of the plan is attached.

On elective care, the NHS published a delivery plan in January 2022 setting out a clear vision for how the NHS will recover and expand elective services over three years. This includes targets to reduce maximum waiting times, so that waits of longer than a year for elective care are eliminated by March 2025, prioritising diagnosis and treatment so that 95% of patients needing a diagnostic test will receive it within six weeks by March 2025 and transforming the way the NHS provides elective care. A copy of the plan is attached.

On urgent and emergency care, performance measures include meeting the ambitions set out in our Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services, published in January 2023, including improving accident and emergency and ambulance performance to 76% of patients being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours by March 2024, and improved ambulance response times for Category 2 incidents to 30 minutes on average over 2023 to 2024, with further improvement against both of these measures towards pre-pandemic levels in 2024 to 2025. A copy of the plan is attached.