Confusion on the BBC and in the Lords over people on waiting lists

4 December 2023

Two peers confused the 7.8 million cases awaiting NHS treatment in England with the number of people waiting (about 6.5 million), during a debate in the House of Lords last Thursday.

The BBC News journalist Laura Kuenssberg also made the same mistake in an article at the weekend. (And the health secretary Victoria Atkins pointed this out when it came up on Ms Kuenssberg’s show [13:40].)

This error has been everywhere recently. We’ve written about it several times, including in this article last week.

For a long time it’s been common to describe the number of cases on the main NHS England waiting list as the number of “people” waiting. But some people are waiting for more than one thing, so this was never quite right.

Then in November, for the first time, official data began to include an estimate for the number of individuals waiting. Both people and cases were at record highs—but now that we have an actual number for each, we think it’s important to use the correct one.

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