Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many locum (a) doctors and (b) general practitioners were employed by the NHS in each of the last five years.

Information on the number of locum doctors and general practitioners (GPs) employed by the National Health Service is not available.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) publishes provisional monthly NHS hospital and community health service (HCHS) workforce statistics for directly employed staff (not GPs) in the NHS in England. This includes information on HCHS doctors on temporary contracts directly employed by the NHS, for example those covering maternity leave, but does not include agency staff. The information available for each of the last five years is in the attached table. The latest data is for February 2015.

The HSCIC also publishes the annual NHS General and Personal Medical Services workforce census, which shows the numbers of GPs working in the NHS in England at 30 September each year, but this data does not include locum GPs.

GPs are independent contractors who hold contracts with NHS England to provide primary healthcare services for the NHS.