Mr. Robert Watt:

Colleagues in front of me can correct me if I am wrong but about 80,000 people are waiting for day case or inpatient procedures, while around 620,000 or 630,000 people are waiting for outpatient consultations. That is not very different to the numbers this time last year. It is around the same. Every year, about 1.5 million people are expected to come on to the list for outpatient consultations and inpatient procedures. The figure for overall waiting list-related activity this year is projected to be 1.7 million. As the Deputy mentioned earlier, that has been affected by Covid. Things have not improved dramatically over the past year for all the reasons we have spoken about but with the dip in the number of Covid cases and, hopefully, pressure on hospitals easing, we hope we can get back to full electives. With the different measures we put in place, we hope that at the end of the year, the lists will be 18% lower than they were at the beginning of the year.