Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress is being made towards meeting the 18-week referral-to-treatment standard, as set out in the Elective Recovery 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 December 2025, the waiting list had reduced by over 330,000 since the Government came into office. This is despite 31.7 million referrals onto the waiting list. Performance against the referral to treatment standard had improved by 2.7% over the same period, reaching 61.5%.

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 marked a vital first step towards delivering the constitutional standard.