Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Government's mandate to NHS England for 2018-19, published on 20 March 2018, what plans his Department has to ensure that the elective surgery and emergency waiting times will be maintained at levels set out in previous years' mandates to NHS England.

The 2018/19 mandate sets out the formal expectation that the National Health Service will meet the agreed constitutional standards on referral to treatment (RTT) and accident and emergency (A&E) waiting times.

The Government expects the NHS to deliver the actions set out in the NHS Planning Guidance for 2018/19 in full as key steps towards fully recovering the performance against these core access standards at the levels they are currently set (RTT 92% and A&E 95%).

We gave the NHS top priority in the 2017 budget with an additional £2.8 billion of funding for the NHS between 2017-18 and 2019-20, and this has been reflected in the mandate. It takes overall funding for the NHS to over half a trillion pounds between 2015 and 2020.