Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the number of non-clinical, non-patient facing staff who are employed in the NHS; and what proportion of those staff were employed in the NHS in (a) England and (b) Gloucestershire in the last 12 months.

NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and we have defined non-clinical, non-patient facing staff as those working in National Health Service Infrastructure support. As of September 2017 there are 164,584 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) infrastructure support staff working in the NHS in England. This is 2,848 more than in September 2016. As of September 2017 there are 1,285 FTE infrastructure support staff working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups in Gloucestershire. This is 55 more than in September 2016.