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 27 July 2021 to Question 33266, for what reasons the Government is not collating data on GP appointments which relate to hospital waiting lists for (a) appointments, (b) treatments or (c) surgery to improve patient flow and pressure on the system.

This data is not collected centrally as it is not possible to link general practitioner appointments to other data sets on activity in secondary care. Appointments in the general practice dataset do not have a unique identifier, such as a National Health Service Number, which can link the data to hospital waiting lists.