Ministers using ‘misleading indicator’ to champion waiting list reduction

The recent reduction in the waiting list repeatedly cited by ministers as evidence of the NHS’s recovery has given a “misleading” impression to the public about the service’s underlying performance, two leading think tanks have warned.

The warning follows health and social care secretary Wes Streeting announcing last month that the reduction in the elective waiting list by “more than 260,000 since we took office” was “not a coincidence”, but was because this government had got “our NHS moving in the right direction”.

However, a new report shared exclusively with HSJ  concludes recent waiting list reductions were mainly due to “unreported removals”. These removals are not explicitly reported in published data, so researchers have had to calculate them manually.

They include removals following list validation exercises, but also a range of other factors, such as the design of the data reporting methods and the nature of software management processes.

And when factoring in these removals, the report from Quality Watch, a joint funded-project between The Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust, concludes the majority of the waiting list reduction was therefore not produced by increased clinical activity.

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Source: HSJ, 13 August 2025