NHS waiting lists in England rise for first time in seven months – as issue becomes general election battleground
The number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment in England has risen for the first time in seven months, new figures show.
An estimated 6.33 million patients were waiting for 7.57 million treatments to be carried out at the end of April, NHS England data shows.
This is up from 6.29 million patients and 7.54 million treatments at the end of March.
NHS waiting lists have become a key focus of the general election campaign.
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Rishi Sunak vowed to tackle the high numbers in January 2023, when it stood at 7.21 million treatments.
On Wednesday night, Rishi Sunak claimed during Sky News’ Battle For Number 10 programme that NHS waiting lists are “coming down”.
But he admitted: “We’ve not made as much progress on cutting waiting lists as I would have liked.”
He was booed by the audience, which represented a mix of voters, after he said junior doctors strikes have had an impact on waiting lists.
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Audience groans during leaders’ debate
The waiting list hit a record high in September 2023, with 6.5 million patients waiting for 7.77 million treatments.
Sir Keir Starmer vowed to bring down waiting lists by creating 40,000 new appointments per week, as one of the first things a Labour government would do.
Tim Gardner, assistant director of policy at thinktank The Health Foundation, said: “With both Labour and the Conservatives promising big improvements in NHS waiting times, today’s figures are a stark reminder of the scale of the challenge facing the next government.”
He added that while there has been “some progress” in recent months “there is still a huge mountain to climb”.
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Lib Dem health spokeswoman Daisy Cooper called on Mr Sunak “to apologise to the public for his failure to get NHS waiting lists down instead of ducking responsibility”.
“The prime minister getting booed by the public over soaring waiting lists last night shows just how angry people are with his record of failure,” she added.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: “This has blown a hole in Rishi Sunak’s claim that the NHS has turned a corner.”
He said the PM “can’t blame NHS staff… the blame lies solely with the Conservatives”.
Mr Sunak blamed junior doctor strikes for long waiting lists
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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