Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to Putting the wheels in motion: Assessing the value of British Red Cross short-term wheelchair loans, published by British Red Cross, July 2015, what assessment he has made of demand for short-term wheelchair loans.

Wheelchair services are the responsibility of local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). No information is held centrally about the demand for short-term wheelchair loans, which are predominantly made by charities such as the Red Cross rather than by CCGs themselves.

NHS England has recently established a new national wheelchair dataset, which went live from 1 July. This will enable the use of data in future to drive improvement in wheelchair services that are provided by the National Health Service.