Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average waiting time was for a GP appointment in (a) the London Borough of Romford, (b) Greater London and (c) England in each of the last 12 months.

Data on appointments in general practice have only been available since November 2017. The most recent data on the time between booking an appointment with a general practice and having the appointment (in days) for Havering Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), NHS London Region and England are presented in the attached table as the average over the 12 months from December 2018 to November 2019.

The data is taken from the NHS Digital publication ‘Appointments in General Practice’. This is a new experimental data collection which is still being refined and improved. NHS Digital is unable to provide appointments in general practice data at parliamentary constituency level. Romford constituency does not align perfectly to a CCG; it has therefore provided data for Havering CCG, which includes the town of Romford.

It should be noted that the ‘time from booking to appointment’ refers only to the time elapsed between the successful booking of an appointment and the appointment taking place. The data does not take into consideration that many patients will be appropriately booking ahead as part of the continuity of care they receive for long-term conditions.