The Government’s NHS waiting list numbers claim simply does not add up - Jayne Dowle

These aren’t just numbers, the Prime Minister added, “it is thousands of people getting the care they need”.

Now we know, thanks to careful analysis by a national newspaper, that 82,000 of these people weren’t getting care at all.

They were either dead, ‘gone away’ or had decided they no longer needed that long-awaited appointment after all, probably having given up or decamped elsewhere, such as to a private hospital or even abroad for treatment.

In November, 346,300 people were removed from NHS waiting lists, 82,000 more than the month before, which accounted for almost the entire claimed drop.

By my basic maths, Starmer’s “thousands” amounts to no more than around four thousand patients, but who really knows?

Starmer and his health secretary Wes Streeting should be hauled over the coals for this. It’s simply unbelievable that the most senior of government ministers can wrongfoot the public like this and assume they can get away with it.

Unless of course, this is a crafty double bluff by Streeting, who’s been very quiet on the subject. Streeting is touted as a leadership challenger. Let his current boss take the rap when the truth emerges? Let’s not go there just now.

The erroneous evidence gets worse; further NHS data shows that in November, hospitals actually carried out around 10 per cent fewer operations than in the month before.

I have to say when I heard Starmer crowing about waiting lists dropping by 86,000 in November, my cynical mind wondered how this could possibly be true.

I pondered that this dramatic achievement – if indeed it had involved actual patients receiving actual care rather than being vapourised from the waiting list – was surely not possible in a winter month, when hospitals are overcrowded with emergencies and admissions. Also, resident (junior) doctors staged a five-day walkout from November 15 in their ongoing pay battle with the government.

Where were the doctors coming from to see all these patients? Why hadn’t I heard anyone I know who’s waiting for treatment shouting from the rafters that they had finally received an appointment? Well, now I know that these considerations failed to take into account the fact that the figure wasn’t actually true.

What’s even more galling to learn is that to achieve this erroneous figure, the government has been paying NHS trusts around £3m a month to trawl through waiting lists in order to identify the patients who no longer require care.

This is a process called ‘validation’, and in essence it does make sense. Hospital administration staff should be keeping on top of waiting lists in any case, reaching out to contact people to make sure they are still requiring treatment.

Surely it should be a routine task. Giving the NHS extra money to do a job it should already be doing is questionable.

Between April and September last year NHS England paid hospital trusts a total of £18,818,566 for these validation exercises. It’s said that over this six-month period more than half a million patients were removed through the process.

One unknown figure who served in the last government told reporters that former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had vetoed a plan by the NHS to conduct a similar exercise because it involved paying staff for “doing something it should be doing anyway”.

It really does make you wonder. When the NHS constantly has its hand out for money, where is it being spent?

Also, what of actual patient care? Danielle Jeffries, a senior analyst at the King’s Fund, a health think tank, says: “For some people coming off the waiting list will be the right outcome but we do have worries about how the process is working. We know that the NHS struggles with administration and concern is that some people may be being removed from the list by mistake or because they don’t respond to communications, which they may or may not have received.”

Given the state of the postal service, twinned with the challenges of digital access for older patients, Jeffries definitely has a point.