“This government has cut waiting lists by more than 330,000, with hundreds of thousands more people treated within 18 weeks. That’s not happening by chance – it’s because we delivered record levels of care in 2025.”
That’s what Health Secretary Wes Streeting told us on Thursday, celebrating the fact that there are now 7.3 million cases on the NHS England elective treatment waiting list.
That waiting list remains 2.7 million cases longer than it was before COVID, and almost double what it was ten years ago.
But as Mr Streeting says, it’s down 330,000 in the 18 months since his party came to government. In the final year and a half of Rishi Sunak’s government, it rose by more than 400,000.
While that improvement is welcome, not all of what Mr Streeting said is strictly true. Not all of the fall in the number waiting is because the NHS delivered record levels of care in 2025.
A significant proportion is because Labour has incentivised NHS Trusts to improve “validation” efforts – checking the list and removing cases that don’t need to be there, even if they have not actually received any NHS care.
These cases are known as “unreported removals” and they are not recorded in any official NHS data.
Sky News analysis reveals that there have been 4.6 million such cases in the 18 months since Labour came to power, up from 4.3 million during the final 18 months of the previous government.
The increase in unreported removals is responsible for about 17% of the total change in direction of the waiting list, with 83% thanks to increased clinical activity.
If the number of unreported removals had remained the same as it was under the Conservatives, the waiting list would still have fallen, but by 110,000 rather than 330,000.
Three of the most prominent UK health thinktanks – the Health Foundation, Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund – all told Sky News that while they welcome the fall to the waiting list, sustained improvements need to come from increased activity rather than data cleaning exercises.
Each of them also criticised the lack of transparency around the unreported removals data.
Responding to the comments, Chris Roebuck, head of profession for statistics at NHS England, said: “Unreported removals have accounted for around 15% of patients who come off the waiting list for decades – they are actually lower now than before the pandemic and it is the record level of operations, tests and scans being delivered by NHS staff that is now getting the waiting list down.
“Validation is not new and does not mean patients miss out on care – it is a routine clinical process that ensures people needing specialist care aren’t stuck behind patients left on the list in error or who no longer need treatment.”
Record highs for “trolley waits” at A&E
Other data released by the NHS on Thursday reveals that the state of NHS England emergency care in January was by one measure the worst since records began.
More than 71,000 people had “trolley waits” longer than 12 hours in January. A trolley wait is a wait to be admitted to hospital after a decision had been made in A&E that the patient needed to be admitted.
That’s the highest number since current records began in 2010, and more in one month than the total number of 12 hour waits recorded over more than eleven years between August 2010 and November 2021.
There were also more than 160,000 trolley waits longer than four hours in January, which was also the highest monthly figure on record.
The Data x Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
