Why no one is celebrating a small fall in NHS waiting lists

The NHS England waiting list has fallen for a fifth month in a row: to 7.54 million in February, down from 7.58 million in January. Since September last year, the overall waiting list has fallen by nearly 200,000 treatments, the ‘biggest five-month fall…in over ten years outside of the pandemic’ according to the Department of Health. So why is no one celebrating?

The problem for the government is not the trajectory of the waitlist, but the total number of appointments on it. While the NHS waitlist appears to have peaked last autumn, there are still hundreds of thousands more appointments on the list compared to when Rishi Sunak promised, at the start of 2023, to make the waitlist one of his five key priorities. 

In January 2023, the Prime Minister announced that the NHS waitlist ‘will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly’. At the time, the NHS waitlist stood at 7.2