Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the current number of vacancies in the (a) health and (b) social care sectors.

The Department does not hold the information requested.

NHS Improvement has published its quarterly performance report of the National Health Service provider sector since Quarter 1 of 2017/18, this contains an estimate of the number of vacancies. The latest publication for Quarter 4 states there are 92,694 full time equivalent (FTE) vacancies in the NHS provider workforce as at March 2018.

The latest NHS Improvement vacancy figures are available at the following link:

www.improvement.nhs.uk/resources/quarterly-performance-nhs-provider-sector-quarter-4-201718/

Skills for Care state that there are approximately 90,000 vacancies in the social care sector and the latest figures can be found on the following link:

www.skillsforcare.org.uk/NMDS-SC-intelligence/Workforce-intelligence/publications/The-state-of-the-adult-social-care-sector-and-workforce-in-England.aspx