Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of waiting times for cardiac care in the North West.

Tackling the waiting list is a top priority for the Government. This includes decreasing wait times for those accessing cardiac care. We have exceeded our pledge to deliver over two million more elective care appointments. More than double that number, or 5.2 million more appointments, have now been delivered in England.

On 6 January 2025, NHS England published the new Elective Reform Plan. This sets out a whole system approach to delivering on the commitment that 92% of patients will wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to consultant-led treatment, in line with the National Health Service constitutional standard, by March 2029.

As of the end of July 2025, compared with the end of June 2024, the overall number of people waiting for cardiac treatment in the North West has fallen by 7,536. However, performance against the 18-week target has decreased by 0.3 percentage points over the same period, namely 56.2% in June 2024 and 55.9% in July 2025.