Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what discussions he has had with local health authorities on reducing the level of waste in hospitals.

We have interpreted ‘waste in hospitals’ to mean clinical, food and general waste.

Ministerial meetings with national and local National Health Service organisations occur on a regular basis and a wide range of issues are discussed. These discussions may have included waste in hospitals but it is difficult to identify when such specific discussions on this topic occurred.