A key government pledge to reduce the size of the NHS’s record-breaking care backlog has been broken, the health secretary has admitted.
Steve Barclay slipped out the news in a Commons statement on Tuesday about a totally unrelated area of NHS policy – his new plan to improve access to GP care.
He disclosed to MPs that the NHS in England had missed its target to ensure that all patients who had been waiting 18 months for an operation in hospital would be treated by April.
It is thought that about 10,000 people who had been waiting for at least 78 weeks were still languishing on the 7.2 million-strong waiting list at the end of April.
The failure to eradicate 18-month waits for care is embarrassing for Rishi Sunak, who made “cut waiting lists” one of his five key pledges and insisted as recently as January that the promise, which NHS England and the then health secretary Sajid Javid first made in the elective surgery recovery plan last year, would be honoured.
Barclay’s admission was the second broken pledge on improving NHS care made by a health minister in the space of a few hours. Earlier on Tuesday morning, Neil O’Brien, a junior health minister, conceded that the target to hire 6,000 more GPs by 2024 – originally set by Boris Johnson – would be missed.
In February 2022, NHS England insisted in its elective recovery plan that it would eliminate all two-year waits for planned care by July last year, 18-month delays by April 2023 and waits of at least a year by March 2025. However, since then it has downgraded that commitment to a pledge to “virtually eliminate” 24 and 18 months by those dates.
But on Tuesday, Barclay told MPs that about one in 10 of the 120,000 people who had been waiting for 18 months in September 2021 had still not been treated. He said: “Last year we launched the elective recovery plan, which is making big strides to reduce the backlog brought by Covid-19.
“We eliminated nearly all waits of over two years by last July and now 18-month waits have decreased by over 90% since their peak in September 2021.”
Opposition parties seized on Barclay’s admission. “That’s the second broken promise today from the Tories,” said Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. “So much for Rishi Sunak’s relaunch. He has failed to deliver on every target in his elective recovery plan, and patients are waiting longer as a result.”
Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said: “This is a shocking admission that has been sneaked out by the minister, showing their target to eliminate 18-month waits for surgery has been missed.
“Patients around the country are being left waiting in pain for the treatment they need because of yet another Conservative failure.”
The Health Service Journal reported last month that NHS bosses wanted the April target put back to June or July, to give them more chance of meeting it.
NHS trusts have made huge efforts for months to tackle 18-month waiters and seen numbers fall considerably, despite the disruption caused by repeated NHS strikes.
