Rishi Sunak Exposes NHS Queues as Tory Parties Are Among the Worst Areas of Britain

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The Conservatives go into the next general election defending scores of seats, with waiting times for routine hospital treatment among the worst in England, according to analysis by the Financial Times.

The seats include constituencies with narrow Tory majorities that the opposition Labor party is expected to win, such as Bury North and Lincoln, as well as deep blue, safe seats held by cabinet ministers.

The analysis highlights the political strain the NHS could pose for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with waiting times now more than twice as long as when his party entered Downing Street in 2010.

In May 2010, the average waiting time for patients in the NHS was 5.5 weeks. The median was 14.8 in February this year, two weeks worse or more in 59 Tory seats, according to the FT.

The dysfunctional state of the NHS is a key issue for voters. A recent YouGov Tracker poll found that 45 percent of people named health as one of the country’s top three problems, just behind the economy at 51 percent.

In March, analysis by the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust showed overall satisfaction with the NHS falling to 24 per cent in 2023, while dissatisfaction reached a record 52 per cent.

The FT analysis allocated constituencies to 106 commissioning bodies known as Sub-Integrated Care Boards (Sub-ICBs), which provide NHS resources for the delivery of local health services and for which the NHS provides waiting list data for consultant-led elective care. New constituency boundaries for the next election were used along with the fictitious results calculated by Rallies and Thrasher.

Bury North is in an area with the second worst waiting time in England, with people facing an average wait of 19 weeks. The Tory margin in this constituency is just 2.4 per cent. In Lincoln, where the Tory margin is 7 per cent, the average wait is 17 weeks.

The Tories, which have more seats overall than Labor, hold 59 seats in the 20 NHS areas with the worst waiting times, compared to Labor’s 33 seats. Thirty-one of these Conservative-held seats are among the 155 blue strongholds that Sunak’s party is expected to hold in recent polls, underlining the danger that voter anger over the NHS poses to the Tory core.

These seats include Health Minister Victoria Atkins’ Lincolnshire constituency of Louth and Horncastle and Housing Minister Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath seat of Frimley.

Both Labor and the Liberal Democrats plan to put the NHS at the heart of their campaigns. Labour, which currently has 201 seats, needs 326 seats to secure a majority at the next election.

“Unlike the 2019 election campaign, the Conservatives are trying not to talk about the NHS at all, so we will shame them by holding them to account for their appalling record,” a Labor official said. “It will be one of our two biggest election issues, along with the economy.”

Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Daisy Cooper said: “Conservative MPs will be held to account at the ballot box for their catastrophic failings on the NHS.”

The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We continue to make great progress in reducing the overall NHS waiting list, which has fallen by almost 200,000 in the last five months – the biggest five-month fall in the waiting list in over 10 years.” outside of the pandemic.

“Given the winter pressures and industrial action, this is a significant achievement.”

According to the latest data, patients across England waited for 7.5 million appointments in February, more than the 7.2 million outstanding treatments in January 2023, when Sunak made shorter queues one of his five election promises to voters. In May 2010 the waiting list was 2.6 million.

The prime minister partly blamed the record waiting list on industrial action over pay across the health service since December 2022, but admitted in February that his government had “not made enough progress”.

The rise in waiting times was already acute before the pandemic hit the NHS, with demand for healthcare increasing faster than increases in government funding since the 2008 financial crisis.

“As a trend, it is quite clear that the performance of the NHS has deteriorated since the early 2010s,” said Max Warner, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank. “It’s not like performance was high before the pandemic.”

Tim Gardner, a policy expert at the Health Foundation think tank, added: “The decade before the pandemic was the most fiscally stringent in health care history.”

Other countries with high funding rates could have benefited from years of increased investment following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning waiting lists would not have built up as much as in England.

Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents health managers, said there was little doubt the NHS would play an “important role” in the upcoming election.

However, he warned that the sub-ICB localities often cover areas much larger than a parliamentary constituency and that they “can accommodate large specialist associations providing services over a much larger regional area, with patients referred from other associations for specialist care.” be sent there for treatment”.