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 21 April 2020 to Question 33582 on Coronavirus: Hospital Beds, what estimate the Government has made of the cost to the public purse of reimbursing the independent sector.

National Health Service patients are benefitting from an unprecedented partnership with private hospitals in the United Kingdom as we battle the COVID-19 outbreak. The NHS is accessing these facilities at cost, with those costs judged by an independent auditor. Reimbursements to the independent sector will be for reasonable and narrowly-defined costs only.

It is not possible at this time to provide an estimate of the cost to the public purse of reimbursing the independent sector.