One of Reform’s many “bold” promises is that if elected they will bring NHS waiting lists down to zero within two years.
That’d be wonderful. But it’s also up there with their dangerous plans for tax cuts in terms of being utterly implausible to anyone who looks into it.
The waiting list for NHS have never, ever been zero. Not once. The day it started it already had a waiting list of almost half a million in-patients from the hospitals that joined the service.
Here’s a chart from the Nuffield Trust to show how it’s built up over the years. As you can see, the way it has been measured and the definition of “waiting list” has changed over time, so you can’t really compare this year’s figure to 1949s. But it has never, under any government or definition, got close to zero.
The previous Labour government made huge investments into the NHS, almost tripling its budget between 1997 and 2009 – and even that was only enough to halve the waiting list, as impressive an accomplishment as that was.
The NHS – staff, buildings, equipment and more – is in a rough state, so any attempt to restore to it the funding it desperately needs to fix that after years of decline is very welcome. But the idea that Reform will eliminate waiting lists, and so quickly as well, is absolutely laughable – “absolute nonsense; completely unachievable”, as Dr Patterson puts it. They must know it’s a lie.
Except, of course, if the way they want to eliminate the waiting list is to eliminate the NHS as we know it. That of course isn’t in their manifesto; but their leader certainly seems to think it should not exist in its current state, and is “open to anything” when it comes to replacing the current universal state provision with an insurance based system.