Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Design for Life roadmap, what progress has been made in reducing NHS equipment wastage.

NHS England has been working on reducing waste and its associated carbon since publication of the NHS Clinical Waste Strategy in 2023.

NHS England’s Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) is a mandatory annual data collection for all National Health Service trusts in England that captures waste metrics in waste type tonnages and not specific items of waste. ERIC figures to 2025 show a reduction of 41,000 tonnes of carbon.

The latest reporting year, 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, which covers the period during which the Design for Life Roadmap was launched, in October 2024, saw a reduction of 10,000 tonnes of carbon from waste.

To supplement this work, since publication of the roadmap, the Department has conducted a series of pilots across a range of different medical products and equipment, with most demonstrating waste savings, in carbon terms, from switching to reusable alternatives. The full report can be found on the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare’s website, who were our partner on these pilots, at the following link:

https://sustainablehealthcare.org.uk/activity/reusable-medtech-in-the-nhs-pioneering-sustainable-healthcare/.

The Department is building on this work with a dedicated Priority Adoption Working Group, which includes clinical and procurement professionals, to identify the products with the strongest case for safe, immediate transitions to reusables across the NHS, to drive further waste, and cost, savings at scale. NHS England is supporting this work, alongside its own initiatives to reduce the overuse of products and waste. For example, through the Five years of a greener NHS: progress and forward look, the NHS has committed to reduce single-use glove and gown use by 25% by 2030, with further information available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/five-years-greener-nhs-progress-forward-look/