Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to increase capacity in the NHS.

The National Health Service is increasing capacity through the expansion of virtual wards to safely care for patients at home, the use of independent sector capacity and establishing a national discharge taskforce to safely maximise patient discharge. We have also announced the ‘Delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care’, which sets out £8 billion to allow the NHS recover and expand elective services over the next three years.

We are investing £2.3 billion in diagnostics to increase the number of community diagnostic centres to 160 by March 2025 and £1.5 billion to support elective recovery, including through the continued deployment of surgical hubs.  This investment will deliver the equivalent of approximately nine million more checks, scans and procedures and 30% more elective activity by 2024/25.