Rishi Sunak’s promise to cut National Health Service waiting lists — “no tricks, no ambiguity” — was an effort to recast his Conservatives as the party of sober government after the chaos of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
(Bloomberg) — Rishi Sunak’s promise to cut National Health Service waiting lists — “no tricks, no ambiguity” — was an effort to recast his Conservatives as the party of sober government after the chaos of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
In the six months since, the numbers have kept rising with the latest figures showing a record 7.4 million people in England waiting for routine care. A Bloomberg analysis of NHS data found nearly every electoral district is failing to meet even half of the government’s key targets, and patients are subject to a postcode lottery that can affect whether they live or die in an emergency.
Read more: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
But on the day the NHS turns 75, and with his government under extreme pressure to improve health care, the prime minister moved to muddy the water on his key pledge. “I think it’s a misunderstanding of the commitments made by the prime minister,” his spokesman, Max Blain, told reporters when asked why waiting list data are moving in the wrong direction.
Blain spoke hours after Health Minister Maria Caulfield told Sky News the list would probably exceed 7.4 million “because we are offering more procedures.”
That is not the message the Conservatives want to be delivering to patients ahead of a general election expected next year. Sunak’s Tory government is trying to convince voters it can turn around the ailing health service, despite deep-rooted problems taking hold during its last 13 years in power.
Read More: Britain’s Cherished NHS Wrestles With Its ‘Reform or Die’ Moment
The opposition Labour Party, which leads the Tories by more than 20 points in recent opinion polls, typically has more voter credibility on the NHS having founded it in 1948, and leader Keir Starmer was cheered by crowds as he entered Westminster Abbey for an anniversary service on Wednesday.
It’s little surprise, then, that the government wants to shift the attention. Rather than focus on the overall waiting list, the government is focused on tackling the issue of patients waiting the longest for treatment, Blain said.
“It’s entirely down to you what you choose to focus on, I’m simply saying the NHS’s own plan of how to tackle those waiting lists sets out an approach which deals with the longest waiters first,” Blain said. “We are rightly focusing on those waiting the longest, so those waiting two years, 18 months and now one year. We are making progress on all of those.”
Pressed again, Blain tried to row back his “misunderstanding” comment. Still, it was Sunak himself who chose to underline a fall in patients waiting the longest for treatment, when he unveiled a long-awaited plan to recruit more NHS staff at a press conference last week.
Read More: Sunak Risks Failing on His Five Key UK Pledges at Halfway Point
Sunak is also struggling on the other pledges he told voters to judge him by: to halve inflation this year, grow the economy, reduce the national debt and stop asylum seekers crossing the English Channel. Six months on from his speech, inflation is proving sticky, recession is becoming more likely, debt has risen and asylum seekers continue to arrive across the Channel.
Asked about the Bloomberg analysis, Blain defended the record of the NHS under the Conservatives. “We always said that coming out of a pandemic would be a uniquely challenging time for our health service,” he said.
In the short term, the government is introducing community diagnostics centers to help speed up health checks and surgical hubs to accelerate procedures, he said. “Some of the performance issues are held in a minority of areas around the country rather than being prevalent everywhere — it’s something that NHS England are very focused on,” Blain said.
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