Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure (a) more efficient use by the NHS of funding from the public purse and (b) support for investment in the health and care system in areas most likely to deliver positive benefit to the most people.

We are taking steps to help spend taxpayers’ money more efficiently and enable the National Health Service to live within its resources. By 2020-21, the Government will increase funding for the NHS by £10 billion a year in real terms compared to 2014-15, to support the implementation of the NHS’s own plan - the Five Year Forward View. We will be giving the NHS £3.8 billion more next year, over and above inflation. This will in part support a sustainability and transformation fund to give the NHS the resources it needs to sustain services as well as delivering the transformational changes required to achieve year-on-year efficiency and productivity improvements. We will use the local planning process to identify those areas where investment in transformation will deliver positive benefits to the most people and will focus on encouraging the most productive ways of working throughout the NHS. These measures will help ensure we get the maximum value for patients and service users whilst delivering high quality care.