NHS Waiting Lists

The NHS has dropped out of the media radar: with three homes Rayner, the incessant boats, and the tumbling economy, there’s been no room to assess how well the NHS is shaping up in the first year of Labour's reign.

Here in the TTE office, we thought we'd take a look at the latest data.

The latest Referral to Treatment (RTT) figures for June 2025 show the waiting list at 7.37 million cases, with roughly 6.23 million individual patients waiting for treatment. Around 2.83 million of these patients have been waiting over 18 weeks; 192,000 over a year for treatment - a decrease of 5,000 from the previous month. The median waiting time to start treatment was 13.4 weeks – a significant increase from the pre-COVID era when waits were 7.5 weeks in June 2019.

So, how has Labour done in its first year of promises to fix the broken NHS?

In the year, NHS waiting times dropped from 7.62 million to 7.37 million. The Labour Party was all glee when it shared a graph in April showing waiting had fallen for 6 months in a row. Well, at least it hasn't got worse, but there’s a problem with their graph:

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Putting aside the risky axis with no labels that paint an overdramatic fall. Here is what the change looks like over the last two years.

One of the problems is that the data for the number of patients on the waiting list has fallen by a comparatively small amount, from 6.39 million in June 2024 to 6.23 million in June 2025 —a fall of 160,000, two-thirds of the waiting list numbers, which fell by 250,000 over the same period.

Labour's graph stitched together the conservative era data for the number of patients in the first section and then the number of treatments for the second section to make the effect look more dramatic. Sneaky, hey (see here for a fuller explanation)?

However, this isn't the only problem. It seems Labour misled the public by removing patients who had died, moved abroad or no longer needed treatment from the lists.

The Telegraph reported that Mr. Streeting stated the waiting list fell in April "for the first time in 17 years." However, researchers noted that on an average working day that month, 13,141 people were added to the backlog, while 14,608 were removed without treatment.

So with a sleight of hand, the waiting lists look better. Yet as a result of this mismanagement and data manipulation, patients continue to suffer.

Consequently, private healthcare has seen a 939,000 increase (3% above 2023), the highest on record, with 275,000 of these admissions occurring due to self-pay (3% less than 2023). The data shows record numbers of cancer patients are going private: in 2024, there were 95,885 cancer admissions to private hospitals.

We need to move beyond the posturing about AI and big data and focus on the serious business of improving patients' health. Particularly as winter is just around the corner - but don’t mention the crisis word just yet -

This post was written by two old geezers who will drop off the waiting list when the bell tolls for them.