Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the extent to which private sector hospital capacity in London is being used to create extra capacity in the NHS.

No recent assessment has been made. While national contracts were used to secure appropriate inpatient capacity and other resource in England, on 31 March 2021 these contracts came to an end. From 1 April 2021, NHS England and NHS Improvement returned to local commissioning arrangements and as such this information is not held centrally.

We have announced £2 billion this year through the Elective Recovery Fund and £8 billion in the following three years to tackle the elective backlog. This will enable National Health Service commissioners and trusts to secure the capacity required locally.