Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made to meet the 18-week treatment target next month as set out in the Elective Reform Plan.

NHS England’s Operational Planning Guidance for 2025/26 set a target that, by the end of March 2026, 65% of patients wait no longer than 18 weeks.

To achieve this, we expect the size of the total waiting list to reduce and have already made significant progress. As of November 2025, the waiting list had reduced by over 312,000 since the Government came into office. This is despite 30.1 million referrals onto the waiting list. Performance against the referral to treatment standard had improved by 2.9% over the same period, reaching 61.8%.

This has been supported by the delivery of 5.2 million additional appointments between July 2024 and June 2025 compared to the previous year, more than double the Government’s pledge of two million. This marks a vital first step towards delivering the constitutional standard.