Liberal Democrats and BBC Breakfast make waiting list errors

Last week BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty stated that 620,000 more people were waiting for NHS elective care compared to when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office, but that isn’t quite right. The figure refers to cases, not people, and doesn’t account for some missing data.

Actually, as of January 2024, there were around 300,000 more individual people in England waiting for non-emergency treatment than in October 2022. Read our full fact check here.

The Liberal Democrats also made a similar mistake last week. They claimed that there were “7.5 million people stuck on NHS waiting lists”, but again that figure refers to cases, not people.

When counting individual people, there are an estimated 6.3 million waiting as of February 2024. This is because one person can be waiting for multiple treatments.

We’ve fact checked similar claims before from senior politicians and public figures, including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney and BBC News journalist Laura Kuenssberg. We’ve also seen Liberal Democrat campaign leaflets confuse cases and people on the NHS waiting list before.

We contacted the Liberal Democrats’ press office and have not received a response, but since getting in touch the Facebook post seems to have been deleted.