Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 24
55th Report - Reducing NHS waiting times for elective care
Published 19 Nov 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Reducing NHS waiting times for elective care All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
NHSE told us that it had struggled to get the clinical community uniformly behind the outpatients programme and that engagement had also been highly variable from specialty to specialty. We heard from the Department and NHSE that in their view the outpatients programme required extensive change to the way everyone in an acute hospital works, from clinicians to administration staff. The fundamental nature of these changes, we heard, meant that industrial action caused significant disruption to the ability of the programme to make progress at the operational level.52 NHSE told us that it had not applied all of the expertise available to them and accepted that it had not communicated the opportunity for change that it sees in the outpatients programme. The NAO report found that while NHSE recognised that progress towards outpatients targets had been slow by September 2022, it did not reset the programme until 2024.53 49 The Royal College of Radiologists (NWT0002); Royal College of Physicians (NWT0025); The Royal College of Ophthalmologists (NWT0032) 50 C&AG’s Report, paras 17, 4.9 51 C&AG’s Report, para 4.9 52 Q 45 53 C&AG’s Report, para 4.10 14
From: Public Accounts Committee, 55th Report - Reducing NHS waiting times for elective care (HC 820), 19 November 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Fifty-fifth Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 19 January 2026).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Thirty-fifth report from Session 2024-26
Published 19 January 2026.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it agrees with the Committee's recommendations, and for most it says the recommendation is already implemented, with target dates for the rest.
- On diagnostic waits, it says the NHS Medium Term Planning Framework requires all systems to achieve the 1% standard for six week waits, with a plan for reaching it "by March 2029".
- On outpatients, it says it is "essential to transform outpatient care" to reach 92% of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks by March 2029; further details "will be published in due course".
- On digital and data, it sets target dates: January 2026 for a single Planned Care Capital Assurance Board, and April 2026 for programmes to tackle digital maturity gaps, while acknowledging "the system is not where it needs to be".
- On unfunded announcements, it says it "will aim to ensure" announcements come with a delivery and affordability plan "wherever possible and appropriate", and that it will publish an impact assessment for the primary legislation on NHS England's integration into DHSC.