NHS waiting list confusion in health select committee hearing

5 February 2025

Labour MP Deirdre Costigan appears to be the latest politician to have confused the number of people on the NHS waiting list with the number of cases.

Ms Costigan, who is also a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, said during an evidence hearing on 29 January: “The big number that [my constituents] have heard is that there are 7.6 million people on the waiting list.”

Full Fact’s AI monitoring tools have previously spotted more than 50 similar claims apparently confusing the number of cases on the NHS waiting list with the number of people.

The latest data from NHS England estimates that as of November 2024, there were about 6.3 million unique patients waiting to start 7.5 million courses of treatment.

The number of cases will always be greater than the number of individual people because some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing.

Past work by the Office for National Statistics does suggest that about 9.7 million adults in England were waiting for some kind of NHS service last winter, but this figure includes many services not covered by the official elective care “waiting list”.  

We’ve fact checked similar claims about the number of people on the NHS waiting list a number of times over the last year—including a recent example in The Times.

We have contacted Ms Costigan for comment and will update this article if we hear back.

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