NHS waiting lists dropped by around 40,000 in one month in January (Image: Alamy Stock Photo)
NHS trusts are booting patients off waiting lists in a cynical bid to meet ambitious Labour targets, reports suggest. Health Secretary Wes Streeting claimed that a drop in the overall backlog by around 40,000 in a single month is a sign that things are “finally starting to move in the right direction” for the embattled service. But the drop to 7.25 million pending appointments in January came as over a quarter of a million patients were removed from waiting lists, either because they went private, died from lack of treatment or were ousted after failing to reply to text messages.
The figure represented a nearly 15% rise in the number of waiting list removals from December, with hospitals paid £33 for every patient taken off the backlog in this way. Sarah Scobie, deputy director of research at the Nuffield Trust think tank, told The Telegraph: “The sporadic improvements we see are not all about the NHS delivering more care.”
Wes Streeting has celebrated waiting list reductions as a step ‘in the right direction’ (Image: PA)
She added: “There was another uptick in ‘unreported removals’ from the waiting list in January, which includes tidying up the data as much as possible by removing patients who don’t need to be on there anymore.
“It’s a legitimate process, but the NHS and the government need to be clear with the public if this plays a big role in getting the overall size of the list down, rather than attributing all the success to more treatment happening.”
Labour vowed to slash waiting times after coming to power in July 2024, alongside providing 40,000 more appointments every week and ensuring 92% of patients are treated within 18 weeks by the end of the current parliamentary term.
The number of people on NHS waiting lists fell for the third month in a row in January, dropping from 7.29 million in December and reaching the lowest level since February 2023, when the number of pending appointments was 7.22 million.
The figure hit a record high in September 2023, when a backlog of 7.77 million treatments was recorded.
It comes after Healthwatch England said there has been a “significant increase” in the number of people paying for private healthcare over the last two years.
The health and social care champion warned of a “two-tier” health system, where those who can afford it no longer have to wait for treatment.
But NHS England said it was “completely misleading” to suggest that removing patients from lists was the reason backlogs have fallen in recent years.
A spokesperson said: “The reason waiting lists have fallen is because the NHS delivered record numbers of appointments, tests, and scans in 2025. That’s how we have cut waiting lists to their lowest level in three years, and year-long waits to their lowest level in almost six.
“The number of patients removed from the waiting list has been stable over the past three years and is substantially lower now than before the pandemic, down from 17 per cent of total removals in 2019 to 14 per cent last year.
“Whether a patient is removed due to a specific treatment starting or other reasons, they still get the care they need – from getting the all-clear following a scan, receiving specialist clinical advice or ongoing medical monitoring of their condition.”
