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 reduce waiting times for gastric band surgery for people who are clinically obese.

Cutting National Health Service waiting lists, including for gastric band surgery, is one of the Government’s top priorities. To facilitate this across elective services, we are increasing activity, with plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25, expanding capacity though creating a new network of community diagnostic centres, and maximising all available independent sector capacity. We are managing demand through specialised advice in primary care and giving patients more control over where they receive their care, and we are increasing productivity; through transforming outpatient services, developing new surgical hubs to increase theatre productivity, funded by part of £1.5 billion and working actively with trusts to support and challenge on their performance.

As a result, we met our target to virtually eliminate long waits of two years or more for elective procedures in July 2022, and as of September 2023, a total of 10,196 patients still remain, a reduction of almost 92% from the peak of 125,000 in September 2021. We continue to make progress to hit our next ambition of eliminating waits of 65 and 52 weeks.