Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of trends since 2021 in the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours in Accident and Emergency departments.

No such assessment has been made. NHS England began publishing data on number of patients waiting more than 12 hours in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in February 2023. The data is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ae-waiting-times-and-activity/ae-attendances-and-emergency-admissions-2025-26/

For Type 1 and Type 2 attendances, the proportion of patients spending more than 12 hours in A&E during the 12 months to February 2026 was 10.1%. This represents an improvement of 0.2 percentage points compared to the figure of 10.3% recorded in the 12 months to June 2024.