What does the pledge mean?
The government plans to raise the level of NHS activity, so that in England there are “an extra two million NHS operations, scans, and appointments every year”. It says this will help to “cut NHS waiting times”.
The Labour manifesto also describes this commitment as “40,000 more appointments each week, during evenings and weekends”.
We’ve asked the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England about their specific plans for the pledge, and will update this page with any information we receive. In practice there are various kinds of NHS appointments, but it seems likely that the government is talking about hospital appointments, and it has said they will be elective appointments.
In its manifesto, Labour said it would achieve the pledge “by incentivising staff to carry out additional appointments out of hours” and that it will “pool resources across neighbouring hospitals to introduce shared waiting lists to allow patients to be treated quicker”.
Two million more appointments would be a relatively small rise in the context of the roughly 162 million hospital appointments a year that are currently happening (if we include all the appointments that were booked, whether or not they were attended).
Indeed since Labour first made this pledge in October 2023, the annual number of appointments has already risen by more than 10 million.
We wrote an article about the scale of this pledge shortly before the election.
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What progress has been made?
The extra out-of-hours appointments are not yet being offered to patients, as far as we can tell. But the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, did announce funding for them in the Budget on 30 October 2024.
What the government meant by “extra” is also a difficult question. If it simply meant that the annual number of appointments will eventually be two million higher than it was when Labour took office, then this number does look likely to rise that much quite soon.
Alternatively, the government may have meant it would introduce a programme that will add two million appointments a year on top of what is happening anyway—in other words, that two million appointments would be delivered solely through its new out-of-hours appointments initiative. If so, we would need new data when a programme is launched, showing the number of appointments it is delivering.
We asked the DHSC in November 2024 whether the pledge meant two million more appointments in total, or two million more appointments on top of what was happening anyway, and it told us that it had not yet set that out. We’ll update this page when we know more.
Despite this uncertainty, we’ve rated this pledge as “In progress” for the time being given the action that has been taken.
