Quote from Times Newspapers:

Paying to massage NHS waiting lists is a shabby trick

Between April and September last year NHS England paid hospital trusts £18,818,566 for ‘validation exercises’

Two weeks ago Sir Keir Starmer claimed that new figures showed NHS waiting lists were down by “more than 86,000” — the “largest fall in a month for over two years … These aren’t just numbers — it is thousands of people getting the care they need.” Well, not quite, prime minister.

An analysis by The Times reveals that this drop was achieved only by removing thousands of patients from the waiting lists through a process known as “validation”. NHS trusts are being paid roughly £3 million a month by the government to trawl through waiting lists to identify patients who have died or who may no longer need or want treatment they are waiting for.

In November, the month that Starmer was referring to, 82,000 more people were removed from waiting lists than in the month before. This accounts for almost the entire drop. At the same time, NHS data shows hospitals actually carried out around 10 per cent fewer operations than in the month before. In plain English, reduced waiting lists coincided with reduced levels of care. Make sense of that if you will.

How can the government seriously think this is a viable method of reducing hospital waiting times? The only way to achieve meaningful progress is to treat more patients quickly, not to pay hospitals to take them off the books. It is hard not to suspect that the validation payments system is being gamed for political gain.

Between April and September last year NHS England paid hospital trusts £18,818,566 for validation exercises. This would mean that over the six-month period more than half a million patients were removed through the validation process. What plausible justification is there for giving the NHS extra money for the routine business of administering waiting lists?

Starmer and his health secretary, Wes Streeting, have repeatedly hailed progress in bringing down the numbers waiting, which have fallen by 300,000 since Labour came to power. The prime minister has pledged that 92 per cent of patients will be seen within 18 weeks by the end of the parliament.

Yet how are voters expected to scrutinise progress when ministers appear so cavalier with the figures? Artificially reducing hospital waiting lists creates a misleading impression of the NHS’s overall performance. It is a new low for a government that has squandered much public trust in such a short time.

Times Newspaper 2nd February 2026 Jawad Iqbal

Jacqueline Emkes writes:

3rd February 2026

The current system for managing NHS waiting lists places an unreasonable burden on patients. Hospitals often send a single text message asking whether individuals still wish to proceed with their scheduled operation. If that message is missed or a reply cannot be sent for any reason, patients risk being removed from the list entirely and effectively returned to the beginning of the process. Expelled from the list …so dispiriting. I experienced this first-hand while waiting over a year for what was classified as urgent jaw surgery. I made every effort to monitor my phone and respond promptly, yet the uncertainty and delays became so overwhelming that I eventually felt forced to seek private treatment at significant personal cost. The waiting list co-ordinator even suggested it’d be better to go private. This approach is not sustainable, and it raises serious questions about fairness, accessibility, and transparency. If we are serious about improving outcomes, we need to examine alternative models used internationally and consider whether other countries manage surgical waiting lists more effectively.