Health claims in the 2024 general election: fact checked

As polling day approaches, we’re rounding up the work we’ve done over the 2024 general election campaign in a series of easy-to-read guides to help you get the facts you need.

Claims about health and the NHS, and in particular waiting lists, have been prominent in the election campaign, and this article lists our verdicts on some of the key claims we’ve seen from the major parties.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of the claims we’ve written about or fact checked, and there have been many accurate claims made too, which we’ve not necessarily covered. So we wouldn’t suggest using these round-ups to judge how honest any party is overall. At the same time, just because we haven’t written about a particular claim doesn’t mean we’ve verified it as true.

Please follow the links to read our full fact checks on each of the claims below: these include links to all the sources we’ve used (so you can check our work for yourself).

“Seven and a half million people are on waiting lists”

We’ve been fact checking claims about the number of people on the NHS waiting list since the first week of the campaign, when a Labour campaign video made the claim above. We’re heard this figure and similar figures (such as “nearly eight million”) throughout the campaign, principally from Labour. The Green Party also made this claim in its manifesto, but has since corrected it after an intervention from Full Fact.

As we’ve written many times before, the latest data from NHS England does not show there are “seven and a half million”, or “nearly eight million”, people on its waiting list. There were actually 7.6 million cases on the waiting list at the end of April, but these only involve about 6.3 million patients. There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing. 

Health is devolved, so the UK government is only responsible for the NHS in England. 

“One in seven Scots [are] on an NHS waiting list in Scotland”

Over the course of the election we’ve also written about NHS waiting lists in Scotland. 

Scottish Labour has said there are 840,000 people on the waiting list in Scotland, while the Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Liberal Democrats have said “one in seven” Scots are waiting. But this misrepresents data from Public Health Scotland (PHS), which shows the number of cases, not people, on waiting lists. 

We don’t know how many individual people are on NHS waiting lists in Scotland, or what share of Scotland they represent, because some are waiting for more than one thing. We do have some survey data which suggests that about 22% of people in Scotland aged 16 and over are waiting for something on the NHS, but this is not official NHS waiting list data.

“[NHS waiting lists are] starting to come down”

This claim has been made by the Prime Minister and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak a number of times over the course of the election. 

NHS waiting lists peaked in September 2023 before beginning to come down, but have ticked back up in the most recent data. The latest NHS England figures, for April 2024, show about 6.33 million people were waiting to begin 7.57 million courses of treatment, up slightly from 6.29 million people and 7.54 million cases in March. 

“Waiting lists will go up and up and hit 10 million”

Labour’s claim that under a Conservative government NHS waiting lists could rise to 10 million has been described as “highly unlikely” by analysts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). 

IFS research economist Max Warner said the claim rests on the “very strong assumption” that future NHS performance will remain the same as past performance.

“[The last Labour government] got the waiting list at the lowest ever level and the highest possible satisfaction in the NHS”

Labour has made this claim a number of times throughout the campaign. 

But as we have written before, both waiting times and patient satisfaction have been measured in different ways since the NHS was founded in 1948, and it’s not clear how different periods of history can be compared in order to claim the last Labour government delivered records under these measures.

“We have committed to building 40 new hospitals by 2030… six are now open to patients”

“The Conservatives have failed to build a single new hospital in the last five years”

The Conservatives have claimed the government has committed to delivering 40 new hospitals by 2030, and that six hospitals were open to patients in May 2024. 

This is misleading. While six projects described by the government as new hospitals have opened, only one—the Dyson Cancer Centre—counts towards the 40-hospital target.

Labour meanwhile has claimed the Conservatives have failed to build a single new hospital in the last five years. But this is not correct, according to the government’s definition of a new hospital at least. The National Audit Office judged that the Dyson Cancer Centre did meet the government’s broad definition of a ‘new hospital’, which can include “a major new clinical building or a new wing, providing a whole clinical service, at an existing hospital”.

“[Scotland has] the best performing core A&E units in the UK”

All four nations in the UK use a ‘four-hour target’ to monitor A&E performance, under which 95% of patients should be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arrival. 

None of the four nations have met this target recently. But looking at this measure in major 24-hour A&E units, the SNP’s claim that Scotland has the “best performing core A&E units in the UK” is broadly correct for the most recent comparable data. In April 2024, 64% of such attendances in Scotland were admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. Meanwhile, it was 60.4% in England and 59.4% in Wales.

However, if you look at the four-hour target for all types of A&E units (including minor injury units), Scotland has worse performance than England and Wales.

“We in fact have 2,711 more GPs working in the NHS than even in 2019”

Early in the campaign, health secretary Victoria Atkins claimed the number of doctors working in general practice has increased over the last five years.

There are different ways to count the number of GPs. Ms Atkins’ figures are correct if you look at the total number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) GPs in England, including those in training. But the number of fully qualified FTE GPs has fallen by 880 over the same period, from 28,486 in March 2019 to 27,606 in April this year.