Shadow chancellor’s NHS waiting list claim fact checked

20 November 2023

Yesterday, while on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed “there are 7.8 million people on hospital waiting lists”. 

That’s not correct, according to the latest NHS England figures. (Health is a devolved matter in the UK and Ms Reeves appears to have been referring to figures for England, based on the 7.8 million figure she cited.)

There are actually an estimated 6.5 million individual patients on NHS waiting lists in England, waiting for 7.8 million treatments (or treatment “pathways”, to use the official jargon). Some people are due to receive multiple courses of treatment, so are counted more than once. 

It’s not the first time we’ve seen confusion over this NHS data—a few weeks ago we wrote about a similar error made by shadow health secretary Wes Streeting. As we write in our full check of Ms Reeves’ claim, until recently NHS England did not publish numbers of unique patients waiting for treatment.

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