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 28 April 2020 to Question 38931 on Hospital Beds: Private Sector, if he will set out the (a) costs and (b) number of beds that have been used.

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.

As it is not currently known how extensively and for how long this extra capacity will be used, it is not possible to estimate the cost to the public purse, nor the number of beds that will have been used.