What does the pledge mean? 

In October 2023, Labour said it would create a ‘Fit for the Future Fund’ of £171 million per year which “will provide enough funding to double the number of CT and MRI scanners in the NHS over a parliament”. We now know this gives it a deadline of mid-2029.

In its 2024 manifesto, the party said it would introduce the fund “to double the number of CT and MRI scanners”. It is likely that the pledge only refers to the NHS in England, since this is the part of the health service that the UK government directly controls, with the rest devolved to the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England, published in July 2025, said the UK is “far behind other countries” in the levels of CT, MRI and positron emission tomography (PET) scanners for its population.

What progress has been made?

In January 2024, NHS England began to publish the National Imaging Data Collection, which gives details on the number of scanners of different types that it holds.

The first publication showed that on 31 March 2023 NHS England had 587 operational MRI machines and 675 operational CT machines, making a total of 1,262 scanners of the type that the government has pledged to double.

This was updated on 29 November 2024, to show that there were 624 MRI machines and 723 CT scanners in the year to March 2024, making a total of 1,347 just a few months before Labour took office. To double this, the data will therefore need to show a total of about 2,700 in 2029.

The first release covering Labour’s time in office was published in February 2026. These figures show that on 31 March 2025 there were 656 MRI and 757 CT machines, totalling 1,413 scanners. This is an increase of 5% on the total for March 2024. If new scanners continue to be added at this rate, it will not be enough to get close to the target by the middle of 2029.

In July 2025, the Department of Health and Social Care told us in a response to a Freedom of Information request that NHS England’s forecast end-of-year position for March 2026 was 680 MRI scanners and 775 CT scanners (1,455 total). We don’t know whether this forecast will have changed since then.

The October 2024 Budget included £1.5 billion to fund “new surgical hubs which will help build capacity for over 30,000 additional procedures, and more than 1.25 million additional diagnostic tests (which use CT or MRI scanners)”.

The supporting document says this is definitely “for new surgical hubs and diagnostic scanners”, although we don’t know yet how much of this money is for scanners specifically, or whether it would be enough to put the government on track to meet its pledge.

In February 2026, health minister Karin Smyth MP said the 2025 Spending Review contained £6 billion of “additional capital investment” over the next five years and this would be for “new diagnostic, elective, and urgent care capacity”. She said this included £600 million in 2025/26 “to support delivery of NHS performance standards”, and that the funding will “deliver new community diagnostic centres, including new MRI scanners, new scanners in acute hospital settings, as well as replacement of the oldest MRI scanners and MRI acceleration software”.

She also said: “further details and allocations will be set out in due course”.

We’ve approached the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England for further details, and will update this page when we receive more information.