There seemed to be another mixup over the NHS waiting list on Today this morning

Labour’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden MP, told Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [2:10:30] this morning: “We’ve got nudging eight million people on waiting lists at the moment.”

Later in the interview, Mr Rajan said: “There’s 7.5 million people in total waiting for procedures and appointments.”

Given the numbers they used, and some of the other statistics Mr Rajan quoted, it sounds like they were talking about NHS England’s referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times data, which is very often called “the NHS waiting list”. 

If so, they both made a common mistake, which we have written about many times, by mixing up the number of cases on the list (about 7.5 million in the latest data) with the number of individual people (about 6.3 million). There are always more cases than people, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing, but we did not know how many more until November 2023, when NHS England began to publish an estimate for the number of people.

The RTT data doesn’t quite show the whole picture, however, as there are several other types of waiting list within the NHS. 

In April 2024, the Office for National Statistics published survey data it collected in January and February showing that about 21% of adults in England said they were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”. That suggests that about 9.7 million adults in England were waiting for something on the NHS at the beginning of the year—an estimate that is even higher than the ones quoted by Mr McFadden and Mr Rajan.