Dr Luke Evans MP is shadow minister for health and social care
The Government has spent months celebrating progress on NHS waiting lists, but beneath the headlines remain questions ministers still cannot answer.
In March alone, more than 350,000 patients were removed from NHS waiting lists without receiving treatment. To put that into perspective, that is roughly the population of Coventry disappearing from the waiting list in a single month.
Nobody disputes that waiting lists should be validated. They should be. Patients who no longer require treatment, have moved away, sought treatment elsewhere or appear more than once on the system should not remain on NHS waiting lists indefinitely.
That is not the issue.
The issue is why the number of patients being removed suddenly surged. Notably, this happened just before the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned to challenge for the leadership of the Labour Party. Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
The latest NHS figures showed removals jumping by almost 100,000 compared with the previous month. Analysis highlighted by both the Health Service Journal and The Times suggested this spike accounted for much of the reduction in the waiting list that ministers were celebrating.
If this were simply routine housekeeping, what changed? Why did removals suddenly reach levels far above the recent trend? Was there a specific end-of-year validation exercise? Were records being cleaned up? Were patients transferred elsewhere?
Or was pressure being applied across the NHS to hit a politically important target?
These are reasonable questions. Yet when I put them directly to ministers in Parliament, no explanation was provided. The response was that removals from waiting lists are “standard practice”.
Since then, more information has emerged, which only makes those questions more pressing.
According to reporting in The Times, NHS England launched a £120 million funding drive between January and March to help trusts hit Labour’s interim waiting list target. Ministers hailed the resulting fall as the biggest monthly reduction in waiting lists for almost two decades.
Yet just weeks later, the waiting list began rising again.
The latest figures show the waiting list increasing for two consecutive months to 7.28 million by the end of May, casting serious doubt on claims that March represented a lasting turning point.
Of course, additional funding to help patients receive treatment is welcome. Every patient seen sooner is a good thing.
But if a one-off funding sprint, combined with an unprecedented spike in patients being removed without treatment, was responsible for much of the improvement, ministers should be honest about that.
The question has never been whether patients should be removed from waiting lists where appropriate. Everyone accepts they should.
The question is: why did removals suddenly increase so dramatically?
When an anomaly of this scale appears in official NHS data, ministers should be able to explain it. Patients and taxpayers should not have to rely on speculation.
Last week, Shadow Health Secretary Stuart Andrew asked a similar question of James Murray, the new Health Secretary.
James Murray’s response suggested there was nothing abnormal about the reduction as “previous Governments have… kept waiting lists up to date”.
That misses the point entirely.
The public deserves more than reassurance that everything is “standard practice”.
If there is a perfectly straightforward explanation, the Government should publish it.
If there is not, there should be an independent review into what sits behind these figures and whether patients are being removed from waiting lists for the right reasons. After all, these are untreated patients being removed from NHS waiting lists, and we still do not know precisely why each case was removed or what happened next.
Patients do not care about statistical exercises. They care about whether they receive treatment. That is why transparency matters.
No one is claiming that every patient removed should have remained on the waiting list.
But when more than 350,000 patients are removed without treatment in a single month, when that figure suddenly jumps by almost 100,000, when the Government celebrates a dramatic fall in waiting lists, and when those waiting lists begin rising again only weeks later, the public are entitled to ask:
What changed? What drove those extraordinary figures? And were the successes the ministers claimed really as significant as they suggested?
Patients deserve clear answers, not political spin.
Until ministers provide them, Conservatives will continue to press for transparency and hold this Government to account.
Dr Luke Evans MP is shadow minister for health and social care
The Government has spent months celebrating progress on NHS waiting lists, but beneath the headlines remain questions ministers still cannot answer.
In March alone, more than 350,000 patients were removed from NHS waiting lists without receiving treatment. To put that into perspective, that is roughly the population of Coventry disappearing from the waiting list in a single month.
Nobody disputes that waiting lists should be validated. They should be. Patients who no longer require treatment, have moved away, sought treatment elsewhere or appear more than once on the system should not remain on NHS waiting lists indefinitely.
That is not the issue.
The issue is why the number of patients being removed suddenly surged. Notably, this happened just before the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned to challenge for the leadership of the Labour Party. Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
The latest NHS figures showed removals jumping by almost 100,000 compared with the previous month. Analysis highlighted by both the Health Service Journal and The Times suggested this spike accounted for much of the reduction in the waiting list that ministers were celebrating.
If this were simply routine housekeeping, what changed? Why did removals suddenly reach levels far above the recent trend? Was there a specific end-of-year validation exercise? Were records being cleaned up? Were patients transferred elsewhere?
Or was pressure being applied across the NHS to hit a politically important target?
These are reasonable questions. Yet when I put them directly to ministers in Parliament, no explanation was provided. The response was that removals from waiting lists are “standard practice”.
Since then, more information has emerged, which only makes those questions more pressing.
According to reporting in The Times, NHS England launched a £120 million funding drive between January and March to help trusts hit Labour’s interim waiting list target. Ministers hailed the resulting fall as the biggest monthly reduction in waiting lists for almost two decades.
Yet just weeks later, the waiting list began rising again.
The latest figures show the waiting list increasing for two consecutive months to 7.28 million by the end of May, casting serious doubt on claims that March represented a lasting turning point.
Of course, additional funding to help patients receive treatment is welcome. Every patient seen sooner is a good thing.
But if a one-off funding sprint, combined with an unprecedented spike in patients being removed without treatment, was responsible for much of the improvement, ministers should be honest about that.
The question has never been whether patients should be removed from waiting lists where appropriate. Everyone accepts they should.
The question is: why did removals suddenly increase so dramatically?
When an anomaly of this scale appears in official NHS data, ministers should be able to explain it. Patients and taxpayers should not have to rely on speculation.
Last week, Shadow Health Secretary Stuart Andrew asked a similar question of James Murray, the new Health Secretary.
James Murray’s response suggested there was nothing abnormal about the reduction as “previous Governments have… kept waiting lists up to date”.
That misses the point entirely.
The public deserves more than reassurance that everything is “standard practice”.
If there is a perfectly straightforward explanation, the Government should publish it.
If there is not, there should be an independent review into what sits behind these figures and whether patients are being removed from waiting lists for the right reasons. After all, these are untreated patients being removed from NHS waiting lists, and we still do not know precisely why each case was removed or what happened next.
Patients do not care about statistical exercises. They care about whether they receive treatment. That is why transparency matters.
No one is claiming that every patient removed should have remained on the waiting list.
But when more than 350,000 patients are removed without treatment in a single month, when that figure suddenly jumps by almost 100,000, when the Government celebrates a dramatic fall in waiting lists, and when those waiting lists begin rising again only weeks later, the public are entitled to ask:
What changed? What drove those extraordinary figures? And were the successes the ministers claimed really as significant as they suggested?
Patients deserve clear answers, not political spin.
Until ministers provide them, Conservatives will continue to press for transparency and hold this Government to account.