Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much the NHS has spent on providing treatments via private hospitals to reduce waiting times since April 2020; and how many NHS patients have received treatments via private hospitals in each month since April 2020.

Total actual costs relating to the national contracts with independent sector providers will not be known until the reconciliation of the contracts in 2021.

Information on the number of National Health Service patients have received treatments via private hospitals since April 2020 is not held in the format requested. However, since the beginning of the pandemic the independent sector has delivered over 2.7 million episodes of treatment and care.