According to the Times, a joint letter from the Prime Minister and his Chancellor to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper confirms there will be little relief from the current funding crisis, even as waiting times for elective and emergency care increase.
While the voluntary exit of Wes Streeting seemed to promise the possibility of a change of tack, replacing him with Yvette Cooper has not been followed by sensible changes, such as dropping, or at least heavily revising the hopelessly confused, backward-looking Health Bill – which was cobbled together under the influence of one-time Health Secretary, now millionaire private sector salesman Alan Milburn.
Instead we have the same old empty verbiage on
Neighbourhood Health Centres most of which won’t be built until after the next election (and 80% of the new investment will be funded through a cosmetically remodelled Private Finance Initiative).
Labour’s half-baked Ten Year Plan, which lacks any implementation plan, capital or cash to carry it out. Meanwhile the backlog maintenance bill for NHS hospitals has soared above £16 billion, and set to rise further, and the promise of new hospitals has been quietly shunted into the sidings.
and of course social care, which has been Andy Burnham’s big selling point, but on which his proposals are feeble and partial (promising only to cover personal care for older people, ignoring other aspects of social care). His plans are for action so far into an uncertain future (the first legislation only to be tabled after the next election, as late as 2029 – assuming Labour win) that they raise the suspicion that he is using the social care issue to divert from the dire state of the NHS.
This suspicion will be reinforced by the revelation of a joint letter from Burnham and his chancellor John Healey to Yvette Cooper rejecting her appeal for additional funding to cover a nurses’ pay award, and for additional resources to boost front line services as winter approaches.
Instead just the usual tokenistic pre-winter handout, this time of £140m, has been announced – nowhere near enough to cover the pay award, let alone the pressures faced across England’s NHS trusts.
This is despite warnings from Cooper and from NHS bosses that without more resources the NHS will fall way short of Labour’s only concrete election promise on health – to return NHS elective services to delivering 92% of waiting list treatment within 18 weeks of referral (which has not been achieved since September 2015) by 2029.
Even the Health Service Journal is warning “Hospital performance on the slide across the board.”
In fact after some limited improvement since Labour took office in July 2024, numbers waiting over 18 weeks for procedures are again increasing (up 4% since March), and current figures show just 65.2% of treatment delivered within 18 weeks. The total waiting list may be below the 2024 level, but it is still almost 7.4 million, and has risen by 3.7% since March: the number waiting over a year has increased by 20% in the last 6 months.
Numbers of individual patients waiting for treatment are also up 3.6% to 6.24 million.
The Health Foundation, working on July figures, has recently warned ministers that the NHS will fall well short of its promised performance unless there are changes:
“If referrals and removals continue to grow at the same rate as they have over the past 2 years, we project that by July 2029 the waiting list will have fallen slightly to 7.11 million (from 7.33 million currently) and 92% of waits will be within 34.9 weeks, rather than 18 weeks. While there is time for new initiatives to speed up progress, on current trends the government’s target would be missed by a considerable margin.”
The underlying problem is lack of capacity (staff, beds, funding) to treat more patients each month than are referred. And while Labour ministers have opted to focus most attention on elective treatment delays, rather than on the increasingly dire delays in Emergency Departments, the numbers of emergency admissions waiting over 12 hours on trolleys are part of the same problem.
Another symptom of the same lack of capacity is the average of 2,300 patients per day now recorded as being subjected to “corridor care” – stuck on trolleys in unsuitable conditions with inadequate nursing and medical support – for lack of beds to put them in.
Despite lots of fine rhetoric from various governments over the last 35 years, no government has been willing to increase the resources for community-based services or home-care sufficiently to enable hospitals to discharge patients efficiently. The result is huge numbers of acute hospital beds (an average of 13,647 in September) being filled with patients who no longer need hospital care, while those who do need the care lie on trolleys, or languish on waiting lists.
The September figures for delayed discharge show
37 trusts with over 100 beds filled with patients who should have been discharged,
17 trusts with over 200 beds tied up this way, and
4 trusts (University Hospitals Bristol and Weston FT; Portsmouth Hospitals University Trust; Liverpool University Hospitals FT; and Manchester University FT) with over 300 beds that cannot be used for emergency or waiting list patients.
A&E statistics tell the same story. Total numbers of emergency admissions in August were actually down from August 2025 – but waits of over 12 hours from decision to admit rose 25% to almost 45,000. In September numbers of emergency admissions rose 4% compared to 2025, but trolley waits over 12 hours rose by 13% to more than 50,000.
The picture of delays from time of arrival in the Emergency department are even worse: in September more than one in ten Type 1 emergency admissions waited over 12 hours for a bed – the highest September figure since records began in February 2023.
Dr Ian Higginson, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said:
“Our Emergency Departments (EDs) are bracing for what we know will be a brutal winter. As today’s data shows, EDs are already unable to cope with the pressure before the cold months – and the seasonal illnesses which come with them – have even hit.
“We will do our best to be there for our patients. But departments are overcrowded, and every day thousands of people are waiting more than half a day. It’s becoming harder and harder to stop more of them coming to harm.”
Burnham’s decision to back John Healey’s new austerity for public services and ignore the danger signs from an over-loaded and still under-funded NHS is a body-blow to the hard-pressed staff who keep services going – and may have seen the change of Labour leader as a promising sign. They are once again left with the need to fight for a fair wage settlement.
Even the NHS Alliance chief executive Sir Ciarán Devane, speaking for trusts and Integrated Care Boards has warned that without additional funding to cover a pay rise, NHS leaders would be put “in the impossible position of having to choose between properly rewarding their staff and protecting frontline patient care”.
While other referrals have decreased in the past year, the Health Foundation report attributes the increased hospital caseload to GPs:
“Referrals by GPs seem to be primarily driving this growth (531,000 more referrals in the year to July 2026 compared with the previous year)”
Here is yet another contradiction of Labour policy: while pressurising GPs to take more appointments and make themselves more accessible, ministers and NHS chiefs are unwittingly uncovering more need for health care that GP teams cannot deliver themselves. The Health Foundation notes that “the largest referrals increase across specialties was seen in elderly medicine (+8%).”
Here we come full circle: the lack of community health, primary care and adequate home care maximises the numbers of frail older patients who are referred for hospital care by GPs – and these patients are then hard to discharge … because of the lack of the necessary services outside hospital.
Without more money and staff to expand these services the hospitals will keep functioning with more than one in eight of its beds filled with patients they have already treated, and with A&E cubicles and corridors filled with patients waiting for beds. Beds filled by Emergency patients cannot be used to bring down the waiting list.
If Burnham thinks – no matter what his future promises of social care some time in the future – he can deliver a Labour election win in 2029 without delivering on the key manifesto promise on the NHS, or tackling the under-resourcing of the NHS and the delays this brings to emergency care, mental health and elective care, he is taking a huge risk.
With almost 17.5 million of the most serious Type 1 attendances at emergency departments in the last 12 months, leading to almost 6.5 million emergency admissions, and 619,000 of those patients having been delayed over 12 hours from decision to admit, huge numbers of families are witnessing at first hand how bad things have got, and how little they have improved since the Tories first initiated an austerity regime in the NHS.
If the Budget on October 28 ignores these problems and continues to squeeze the NHS even tighter on funding, the only people happy will be the opposition parties.
Dear Reader,
If you like our content please support our campaigning journalism to protect health care for all.
Our goal is to inform people, hold our politicians to account and help to build change through evidence based ideas.
Everyone should have access to comprehensive healthcare, but our NHS needs support. You can help us to continue to counter bad policy, battle neglect of the NHS and correct dangerous mis-infomation.
Supporters of the NHS are crucial in sustaining our health service and with your help we will be able to engage more people in securing its future.
Please donate to help support our campaigning NHS research and journalism.
According to the Times, a joint letter from the Prime Minister and his Chancellor to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper confirms there will be little relief from the current funding crisis, even as waiting times for elective and emergency care increase.
While the voluntary exit of Wes Streeting seemed to promise the possibility of a change of tack, replacing him with Yvette Cooper has not been followed by sensible changes, such as dropping, or at least heavily revising the hopelessly confused, backward-looking Health Bill – which was cobbled together under the influence of one-time Health Secretary, now millionaire private sector salesman Alan Milburn.
Instead we have the same old empty verbiage on
Neighbourhood Health Centres most of which won’t be built until after the next election (and 80% of the new investment will be funded through a cosmetically remodelled Private Finance Initiative).
Labour’s half-baked Ten Year Plan, which lacks any implementation plan, capital or cash to carry it out. Meanwhile the backlog maintenance bill for NHS hospitals has soared above £16 billion, and set to rise further, and the promise of new hospitals has been quietly shunted into the sidings.
and of course social care, which has been Andy Burnham’s big selling point, but on which his proposals are feeble and partial (promising only to cover personal care for older people, ignoring other aspects of social care). His plans are for action so far into an uncertain future (the first legislation only to be tabled after the next election, as late as 2029 – assuming Labour win) that they raise the suspicion that he is using the social care issue to divert from the dire state of the NHS.
This suspicion will be reinforced by the revelation of a joint letter from Burnham and his chancellor John Healey to Yvette Cooper rejecting her appeal for additional funding to cover a nurses’ pay award, and for additional resources to boost front line services as winter approaches.
Instead just the usual tokenistic pre-winter handout, this time of £140m, has been announced – nowhere near enough to cover the pay award, let alone the pressures faced across England’s NHS trusts.
This is despite warnings from Cooper and from NHS bosses that without more resources the NHS will fall way short of Labour’s only concrete election promise on health – to return NHS elective services to delivering 92% of waiting list treatment within 18 weeks of referral (which has not been achieved since September 2015) by 2029.
Even the Health Service Journal is warning “Hospital performance on the slide across the board.”
In fact after some limited improvement since Labour took office in July 2024, numbers waiting over 18 weeks for procedures are again increasing (up 4% since March), and current figures show just 65.2% of treatment delivered within 18 weeks. The total waiting list may be below the 2024 level, but it is still almost 7.4 million, and has risen by 3.7% since March: the number waiting over a year has increased by 20% in the last 6 months.
Numbers of individual patients waiting for treatment are also up 3.6% to 6.24 million.
The Health Foundation, working on July figures, has recently warned ministers that the NHS will fall well short of its promised performance unless there are changes:
“If referrals and removals continue to grow at the same rate as they have over the past 2 years, we project that by July 2029 the waiting list will have fallen slightly to 7.11 million (from 7.33 million currently) and 92% of waits will be within 34.9 weeks, rather than 18 weeks. While there is time for new initiatives to speed up progress, on current trends the government’s target would be missed by a considerable margin.”
The underlying problem is lack of capacity (staff, beds, funding) to treat more patients each month than are referred. And while Labour ministers have opted to focus most attention on elective treatment delays, rather than on the increasingly dire delays in Emergency Departments, the numbers of emergency admissions waiting over 12 hours on trolleys are part of the same problem.
Another symptom of the same lack of capacity is the average of 2,300 patients per day now recorded as being subjected to “corridor care” – stuck on trolleys in unsuitable conditions with inadequate nursing and medical support – for lack of beds to put them in.
Despite lots of fine rhetoric from various governments over the last 35 years, no government has been willing to increase the resources for community-based services or home-care sufficiently to enable hospitals to discharge patients efficiently. The result is huge numbers of acute hospital beds (an average of 13,647 in September) being filled with patients who no longer need hospital care, while those who do need the care lie on trolleys, or languish on waiting lists.
The September figures for delayed discharge show
37 trusts with over 100 beds filled with patients who should have been discharged,
17 trusts with over 200 beds tied up this way, and
4 trusts (University Hospitals Bristol and Weston FT; Portsmouth Hospitals University Trust; Liverpool University Hospitals FT; and Manchester University FT) with over 300 beds that cannot be used for emergency or waiting list patients.
A&E statistics tell the same story. Total numbers of emergency admissions in August were actually down from August 2025 – but waits of over 12 hours from decision to admit rose 25% to almost 45,000. In September numbers of emergency admissions rose 4% compared to 2025, but trolley waits over 12 hours rose by 13% to more than 50,000.
The picture of delays from time of arrival in the Emergency department are even worse: in September more than one in ten Type 1 emergency admissions waited over 12 hours for a bed – the highest September figure since records began in February 2023.
Dr Ian Higginson, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said:
“Our Emergency Departments (EDs) are bracing for what we know will be a brutal winter. As today’s data shows, EDs are already unable to cope with the pressure before the cold months – and the seasonal illnesses which come with them – have even hit.
“We will do our best to be there for our patients. But departments are overcrowded, and every day thousands of people are waiting more than half a day. It’s becoming harder and harder to stop more of them coming to harm.”
Burnham’s decision to back John Healey’s new austerity for public services and ignore the danger signs from an over-loaded and still under-funded NHS is a body-blow to the hard-pressed staff who keep services going – and may have seen the change of Labour leader as a promising sign. They are once again left with the need to fight for a fair wage settlement.
Even the NHS Alliance chief executive Sir Ciarán Devane, speaking for trusts and Integrated Care Boards has warned that without additional funding to cover a pay rise, NHS leaders would be put “in the impossible position of having to choose between properly rewarding their staff and protecting frontline patient care”.
While other referrals have decreased in the past year, the Health Foundation report attributes the increased hospital caseload to GPs:
“Referrals by GPs seem to be primarily driving this growth (531,000 more referrals in the year to July 2026 compared with the previous year)”
Here is yet another contradiction of Labour policy: while pressurising GPs to take more appointments and make themselves more accessible, ministers and NHS chiefs are unwittingly uncovering more need for health care that GP teams cannot deliver themselves. The Health Foundation notes that “the largest referrals increase across specialties was seen in elderly medicine (+8%).”
Here we come full circle: the lack of community health, primary care and adequate home care maximises the numbers of frail older patients who are referred for hospital care by GPs – and these patients are then hard to discharge … because of the lack of the necessary services outside hospital.
Without more money and staff to expand these services the hospitals will keep functioning with more than one in eight of its beds filled with patients they have already treated, and with A&E cubicles and corridors filled with patients waiting for beds. Beds filled by Emergency patients cannot be used to bring down the waiting list.
If Burnham thinks – no matter what his future promises of social care some time in the future – he can deliver a Labour election win in 2029 without delivering on the key manifesto promise on the NHS, or tackling the under-resourcing of the NHS and the delays this brings to emergency care, mental health and elective care, he is taking a huge risk.
With almost 17.5 million of the most serious Type 1 attendances at emergency departments in the last 12 months, leading to almost 6.5 million emergency admissions, and 619,000 of those patients having been delayed over 12 hours from decision to admit, huge numbers of families are witnessing at first hand how bad things have got, and how little they have improved since the Tories first initiated an austerity regime in the NHS.
If the Budget on October 28 ignores these problems and continues to squeeze the NHS even tighter on funding, the only people happy will be the opposition parties.
Dear Reader,
If you like our content please support our campaigning journalism to protect health care for all.
Our goal is to inform people, hold our politicians to account and help to build change through evidence based ideas.
Everyone should have access to comprehensive healthcare, but our NHS needs support. You can help us to continue to counter bad policy, battle neglect of the NHS and correct dangerous mis-infomation.
Supporters of the NHS are crucial in sustaining our health service and with your help we will be able to engage more people in securing its future.
Please donate to help support our campaigning NHS research and journalism.
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