Mr. Bernard Gloster:

A short-term initiative is something that is separate from, or outside of, the service plan. If we take the period since 2021, each year the Government has had a short-term waiting list action plan, now referred to by the Minister as the waiting time action plan. They would all be short-term initiatives. With the NTPF, you take a list, you assess the scale of the list, you assess if there is an opportunity to go in and, essentially, clear it out and put the service on a steady footing, and then you use productivity to maintain that afterwards.

Core services would be the average day-to-day running of a hospital. Some hospitals had ended up with some third-party dependency, and they will wind that down between now and next June. For example, it could be the running of an emergency theatre at the weekend.