Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 20 April 2023 to Question 179995, if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of the waiting time for appointments at the oncology department of Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

We have no current plans to make a specific assessment. NHS England assesses the effectiveness of trust waiting time recovery plans, and publishes provider-based cancer waiting times data. Provisional data for February 2023 shows that 86.7% of patients with symptoms that might indicate cancer, who were given an urgent referral by their general practitioner to The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, were given an appointment with a consultant within two weeks of their urgent referral by the trust. This is an improvement from 75.5% in February 2022.