The NHS waiting list in England, which already stands at a record 6 million, will keep on growing for another two years as millions more patients seek care, Sajid Javid has told MPs.
The health secretary made the admission in a Commons statement on Tuesday to launch the long-awaited elective recovery plan setting out the NHS’s plan to tackle the backlog of hospital treatment.
As many as 10 million people who did not seek care from the NHS since the Covid pandemic struck in March 2020 could now turn to it for help, Javid said.
“Even if half of these people come forward, this is going to place huge demand on the NHS,” he added.
Assuming that 5 million of the 10 million start seeking care over the next three years, the NHS waiting list will keep getting bigger and bigger until March 2024, he added. Downing Street is worried that, alongside the cost-of-living crisis, long waits for NHS care are an issue of real public concern and one that Labour will seek to highlight.
Under the plan, the NHS will have to ensure that by July this year no one has to wait longer than two years for planned treatment in hospital – currently, 18,600 people have been waiting that long.
However, it will take until March 2025 – well past the next general election in May 2024 – to end the situation where large numbers of patients, currently 307,000, are forced to wait over a year.
Under the NHS’s referral to treatment pathway, patients needing elective care in hospital should be treated within 18 weeks, a right enshrined in the NHS constitution.
The publication of the plan sparked a spat between Javid and Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary. Streeting said the plan “falls seriously short of the scale of the challenge facing the NHS and the misery that is affecting millions of people, stuck on record-high NHS waiting lists”.
He also criticised Javid for trying to portray the backlog as having been caused by Covid. It was rather “a Tory backlog”, caused by years of underfunding of the NHS and failure to tackle the health service’s understaffing, he claimed. The backlog stood at 4.4 million before the pandemic but has since shot up to 6 million. It was 2.6 million when the Conservatives came to power in May 2010.
The document contains mainly initiatives that have been announced previously by Javid and NHS England. They include plans for more community diagnostic hubs – one-stop shops where people can have diagnostic tests – and also more surgical hubs, which can undertake large numbers of operations more quickly.
In addition, patients whose operations have been delayed for a long time will be offered the chance to have them in hospitals outside their home area and NHS trusts will be encouraged to send patients to be treated in local private hospitals.
Boris Johnson said the plan was “the biggest catch-up programme in the history of the health service, backed by unprecedented funding”. Originally due in December, it was delayed by the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid and protracted wrangling between NHS England and the government over targets spelling out how quickly hospitals can be expected to eradicate one and two-year waits.
There were also reports – denied by Johnson – that Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, had refused to sign off the plan amid uncertainty over the prime minister’s future.
NHS experts and staff organisations gave the plan a cautious welcome, but they highlighted the lack of a matching strategy to tackle the NHS’s longstanding and widespread workforce problems
“The backlog of long waits will not be cleared by March 2025 and it will be impossible to carry out 9m more tests and checks if there are not the right number and mix of staff in place,” said Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation.
Richard Murray, the chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, said that the plan “if successfully implemented will improve access to services for the many patients anxiously waiting for care in pain and discomfort”. But the targets in it “look ambitious”, because Covid disruption to NHS care means it is impossible to know how many people who need it will come forward seeking it.
