Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have plans to use the private healthcare sector to help clear the backlog of healthcare cases caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

National Health Service patients are benefitting from an unprecedented partnership with private hospitals in the United Kingdom as we battle the COVID-19 outbreak. The Department and NHS England and NHS Improvement have worked with the independent sector to secure all appropriate inpatient capacity and other resource across England. This has increased NHS capacity and ensured that more facilities are available for patients diagnosed with COVID-19.

Throughout this period, independent providers have continued to provide urgent operations for NHS patients, as well as their private pay or insured patients.

As part of preparing for winter, the Government has provided an additional £3 billion to the NHS. This will allow the NHS to continue to use the extra hospital capacity acquired from the independent sector and also to maintain the Nightingale hospitals until the end of March.