Government’s claim to have cut waiting lists is potentially misleading

A reader drew our attention to an article about NHS England waiting lists in today’s Times, in which a Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson said: “Cutting waiting lists is one of the government’s top five priorities, and despite the impact of strikes, we have cut the total waiting list and the number of individual patients waiting for treatment.”

This is seriously missing context. It’s true that the number of cases and patients waiting for treatment fell slightly in the latest data, for October 2023. The DHSC confirmed to Full Fact that this is what the spokesperson was referring to.

However, this came at the end of a long series of rises, which leaves the numbers much higher than they were a year ago today, when the five priorities were announced.

Between the end of December 2022, which is the closest point before the announcement, and the end of October 2023, which is the latest data available, the estimated number of people on the waiting list rose by around ​​384,000, and the number of cases by about 506,000. (Some people are waiting for more than one thing.) 

In this context, it is potentially misleading to say the government “have cut” the waiting lists—even though they did fall by 54,000 people and 66,000 cases between September and October.

We wrote a more detailed article about the different kinds of waiting lists last June.