Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to implement the provisions of the NHS Long Term Plan on reducing waiting lists.

The NHS Long Term Plan was published in January 2019. Since then, we have faced the COVID-19 pandemic which put huge pressure on services that were unforeseen at the time, causing waiting lists for planned treatment to grow.

In response to this, the National Health Service published the Delivery Plan for Tackling the COVID-19 Backlog of Elective Care in February 2022. The plan set out a clear vision for how the NHS will recover and expand elective services over the following three years, including cutting the longest waits for treatment, increasing elective activity and committing to delivering nine million additional treatments and diagnostic treatments.

In July 2022, the NHS successfully met the first target in our plan to virtually eliminate waits of over two years, and thanks to the incredible work of NHS staff, waits of more than 18 months have been reduced by over 90%.