Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for (a) GP appointments, (b) Accident and Emergency treatment and (c) delayed medical (i) treatments and (ii) operations in hospital.

On 22 September 2022, we announced ‘Our plan for patients’ which contains measures to help people make an informed choice about which practice is best for them, book general practice appointments more easily, benefit from more options when they need care and bolster general practice teams with other professionals who can help them to deliver over a million more appointments this winter.

As announced in the Autumn Statement, the Government is investing an additional £3.3 billion in each of 2023/24 and 2024/25 to enable rapid action to improve urgent and emergency, elective, and primary care performance to pre-pandemic levels.

The pandemic has put enormous pressures on the National Health Service with elective waiting lists growing to over 7 million patients but we remain committed to ensuring people get the right care at the right time. The NHS will set out detailed recovery plans in the coming weeks.