Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to increase NHS capacity in winter 2025-26.

We have done more than ever to prepare for this winter, including stress testing winter plans, making sure community teams have the vaccines they need, and identifying patients most vulnerable in winter.

The Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) Plan for 2025/26, published on 6 June 2025, focuses on those improvements that will see the biggest impact on UEC performance this winter and on making UEC better every day, backed by a total of nearly £450 million of funding. The plan commits to increasing the number of patients receiving urgent care in the community by expanding services such as urgent community response, neighbourhood multidisciplinary teams and increasing the use of virtual wards, also known as hospital at home. This will support winter resilience by expanding and optimising services such as urgent community response and increasing the use of virtual wards in each integrated care system, as well as planning with the ambulance services and 111 how to use this capacity most effectively.