“The target was never particularly ambitious,” says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) about Labour’s plan to add two million extra NHS appointments during their first year in power.

In February, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced they had achieved the feat early. He recently described the now 3.6m additional appointments achieved in their first eight months as a “massive increase”.

PM signs Chagos deal – politics latest

But new data, obtained by independent fact checking charity Full Fact and shared exclusively with Sky News, reveals this figure actually signalled a slowing down in new NHS activity.

There was an even larger rise of 4.2m extra appointments over the same period the year before, under Rishi Sunak’s government.

The data also reveals how unambitious the target was in the first place.

We now know two million extra appointments over the course of a year represents a rise of less than 3% of the almost 70 million carried out in the year to June 2024.

In the last year under Mr Sunak, the rise was 10% – and the year before that it was 8%.

Responding to the findings, Sarah Scobie, deputy director of independent health and social care think tank the Nuffield Trust, told Sky News the two million target was “very modest”.

She said delivering that number of appointments “won’t come close to bringing the treatment waiting list back to pre-pandemic levels, or to meeting longer-term NHS targets”.

The IFS said it was smaller than the annual growth in demand pressures forecast by the government.

What exactly did Labour promise?

The Labour election manifesto said: “As a first step, in England we will deliver an extra two million NHS operations, scans, and appointments every year; that is 40,000 more appointments every week.”

We asked the government many times exactly how it would measure the pledge, as did policy experts from places like the IFS and Full Fact. But it repeatedly failed to explain how it was defined.

Leo Benedictus, a journalist and fact-checker at Full Fact, told Sky News: “We didn’t know how they were defining these appointments.

“When they said that there would be more of them, we didn’t know what there would be more of.”

Even once in government, initially Labour did not specify their definition of “operations, scans, and appointments”, or what the baseline “extra” was being measured against.

This prevented us and others from measuring progress every month when NHS stats were published. Did it include, for instance, mental health and A&E appointments? And when is the two million extra comparison dating from?

Target met, promise kept?

Suddenly, in February, the government announced the target had already been met – and ever since, progress on appointments has been a key boast of ministers and Labour MPs.

At this point, they did release some information: the definition of procedures that allowed them to claim what had been achieved. They said the target involved is elective – non-emergency – operations excluding maternity and mental health services; outpatient appointments and diagnostic tests.

However, we still did not have a comprehensive baseline to measure the two million increase against.

The government data instead relied on a snapshot: comparing the number of appointments carried out from July to November 2024 with the number from July to November 2023, and adjusted them for the number of working days in each period.

This did not tell us if the NHS had already been adding appointments under the Conservatives, and at what pace, and therefore whether this target was a big impressive ramping up of activity or, as it turns out, actually a slowing down.

Since then, a number of organisations, like Full Fact, have been fighting with the government to release the data.

Mr Benedictus said: “We asked them for that information. They didn’t publish it. We didn’t have it.

“The only way we could get hold of it was by submitting an FOI request, which they had to answer. And when that came back about a month later, it was fascinating.”

This finally gives us the comparative data allowing us to see what the baseline is against which the government’s “success” is being measured.

Full Fact passed the data to Sky News because it had seen our reporting about how the information published by the NHS in February was not sufficient to be able to assess whether things were getting better or worse.

What the government says now

We put our findings to the government.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “On entering office last July, the secretary of state [Wes Streeting] was advised that the fiscal black hole meant elective appointments would have to be cut by 20,000 every week.

“Instead, this government provided the extra investment and has already delivered 3.6 million additional appointments – more than the manifesto commitment the British public voted for – while also getting more patients seen within 18 weeks.

“In the nine months since this government took office, the waiting list has dropped by over 200,000 – more than five times as much as it had over the same period the previous year – and also fell for six consecutive months in a row.”

We put this to Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak’s chancellor during his last two years as prime minister, and health secretary for six years under David Cameron and Theresa May.

He said: “What these numbers seem to show is that the rate of appointments was going up by more in the last government than it is by this government. That’s really disappointing when you look at the crisis in the NHS.

“All the evidence is that if you want to increase the number of people being treated, you need more capacity in the system, and you need the doctors and nurses that are there to be working more productively.

“Instead what we’ve had from this government is the vast majority of the extra funding for the NHS has gone into pay rises, without asking for productivity in return.”

Edward Argar, shadow health secretary, accused the government of a “weak attempt […] to claim credit for something that was already happening”.

“We need to see real and meaningful reform that will genuinely move the dial for patients,” he added.

Is the NHS getting better or worse?

New polling carried out by YouGov on behalf of Sky News this week also reveals 39% of people think the NHS has got worse over the past year, compared with 12% who think it’s got better.

Six in 10 people say they do not trust Keir Starmer personally on the issue of the NHS, compared with three in 10 who say they do.

That is a better rating than some of his rivals, however. Just 21% of people say they trust Nigel Farage with the NHS, and only 16% trust Kemi Badenoch – compared with 64% and 60% who do not.

Ed Davey performs better, with 30% saying they trust him and 38% saying they do not.

Ms Scobie of the Nuffield Trust told Sky News “the government is right to make reducing long hospital treatment waits a key priority […] but much faster growth in activity is needed for the NHS to see a substantial improvement in waiting times for patients.”

The government is correct, however, to point out the waiting list having dropped by more than 200,000 since it’s been in office. This is the biggest decline between one July and the following February since current waiting list statistics were first published under Gordon Brown.

The percentage of people waiting less than 18 weeks for treatment is also falling for the first time, other than a brief period during the pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade.

There is still a long way to go, though. Figures released last week showed the total number of people waiting for NHS treatment in England had risen again in March, following six months of positive progress.

The latest figures show 6.25m people waiting for 7.42m treatments (some people are on the list for more than one issue). That means more than one in 10 people in England are currently waiting for NHS treatment.

There continues to be a fall in the number who have been waiting longer than a year. It’s now 180,242, down from almost 400,000 in August 2023 and over 300,000 in June 2024, the Conservatives’ last month in power.

But that number is still incredibly high by historical standards. It remains over 100 times higher than it was before the pandemic.

The government has a separate pledge that no more than 8% of patients will wait longer than 18 weeks for treatment, by the time of the next election. Despite improvements in recent months, currently more than 40% wait longer than this.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Sir Keir Starmer’s claim he is U-turning on cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners because he now has the money is not “credible”, Harriet Harman has said.

👉 Listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

The Labour peer, speaking to Sky News political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, said the prime minister made the move as it was so unpopular with voters.

PM signs Chagos deal – politics latest

She also said Labour’s poor results at the local elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Sir Keir said on Wednesday he would ease the cut to the winter fuel payment, which has been removed from more than 10 million pensioners this winter after it became means-tested.

He and his ministers had insisted they would stick to their guns on the policy, even just hours before Sir Keir revealed his change of heart at PMQs

Baroness Harman said: “It’s always been contested and always been unpopular.

“But the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the elections. The council elections and the Runcorn by-election, where the voters were saying, ‘this is not the change we voted for’.

“At the end of the day, you cannot just keep flying in the face of what voters – particularly if they’re people who previously voted for you – wanted.”

Baroness Harman is unconvinced by Sir Keir’s claim he can U-turn because there is more money due to good economic management by the government.

“I don’t think that’s credible as an argument,” she said.

“It really is the fact that voters just said ‘this is not the change we voted for, we’re not going to have this’.”

The challenge for the government now, she said, is deciding who will get the allowance moving forward, when they’ll get it, and when it will all be announced.

Read more:
Ex-PM suggests who should miss out on winter fuel payments

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed to just one major fiscal event a year, meaning just one annual budget in the autumn.

Autumn budgets normally take place in October, with the last one at the end of the month.

If this year’s budget is around the same date, it will leave little time for the extra winter fuel payments to be made, as they are paid between November and December.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast the economy will have to be “strong enough” for the government to U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts.

He also said the public would have to wait for the budget for any announcement.

Before the amps are even switched on in Brockwell Park, there’s been a lot of noise about who should or shouldn’t be performing.

It’s where Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap are set to play their first major show since band member Mo Chara was charged for allegedly displaying a flag in support of the terrorist group Hezbollah at one of their gigs.

Before that, there had been calls for festivals to reconsider booking the band over their political stances, and several have done, which prompted artists like Brian Eno, the Mystery Jets and CMAT to sign an open letter accusing Westminster and the British media of a campaign to “remove Kneecap from the public eye”.

They put their names to wording that said “in a democracy, no political figures… have the right to dictate who does and does not play at music festivals.”

The band have since claimed they’re the victims of “political policing” designed to silence their views on Gaza.

So what’s the reality like for artists who are outspoken at a time when the world is so divided?

As some of the biggest names in music gathered in London for the Ivors, an annual celebration of songwriting, Self-Esteem – aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor – said the level of scrutiny can be “terrifying”.

‘The problem with the internet’

She told Sky News: “The problem with the internet is you say one thing, which gets scrutinised, and then you shit yourself, you really do… then you’re advised not to. And then you’re like ‘don’t advise me not to!’

“You second-guess anything you want to say any more… but any time I do that, I think ‘well that’s why you’ve got to say it then’.”

She said it can be frustrating that focus turns on to pop stars’ opinions instead of “the people doing the bad things”.

Read more:
Why are Kneecap controversial?

‘Being a pop artist isn’t just about the music’

Former Little Mix singer Jade said: “To be a pop artist these days, it’s not just about music, it’s: ‘What’s your political stance?’

“I’ve always been quite vocal about those things, but in doing so you have even more of a scary spotlight on you, constantly assessing what your thoughts are as a human…it is scary.”

Trinidad-born London artist Berwyn, whose songs depict his struggles with UK immigration, says: “Silencing freedom of speech… is a road we don’t want to walk down.

“I’m not a politician, this is a very complicated issue, but I do absolutely believe in a human’s right to express themselves freely.”

But is that freedom of speech dependent on what side you’re coming from?

‘Unethical investments’

Soon, an event called Mighty Hoopla will take place at Brockwell Park as part of its programme of six festivals this summer.

Artists performing at that are coming under increased pressure from pro-Palestine groups to quit because it’s owned by a company called Superstruct, which has links to an American investment firm called KKR.

Critics argue that any KKR-affiliated events should be a red flag to artists as campaigners claim it “invests billions of pounds in companies” that do things like “develop Israeli underground data centres”, and they say it has shares in companies that “advertise property on illegally occupied land in the West Bank”.

👉 Listen to Sky News Daily on your podcast app 👈

Mighty Hoopla itself has said while it “cannot control investments made in our parent companies”, it wants to “state its clear opposition to KKR’s unethical investments”.

And Superstruct – which puts on over 80 festivals around the world – says while horrified by the crisis in Gaza: “We are aware that there is a significant amount of debate… around our festivals.

“Our owners, made up of our promoters and several investment firms, support us to achieve the highest standards… fans and artists rightly expect.”

They insist that operationally, Superstruct is independently run and all its “revenue and profits… remains entirely within our business… towards the ongoing development… of our festivals.”

Read more from Sky News:
Kid Cudi says Diddy ‘messed with his dog’
Bono calls for Israel to be ‘released from Netanyahu’
Chris Brown posts message as singer is bailed

Even deciding where to perform can have political connotations for musicians these days.

As Tom Gray, a founding member of the rock band Gomez, now chair of the Ivors, explains: “The amount of commercial interest required to get a young artist into the public eye means they have to keep their head down a lot and that’s a terrible shame.

“It’s not just artistic expression, but personal human expression is one of the fundamental things that allows people to feel they have agency.”