Billions have been spent to tackle NHS waiting lists, but recovery targets continue to be missed, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has found. In a new report, MPs likened Government plans for NHS reform to “poor practices seen on HS2”.
In a new report on reducing NHS waiting times for planned (or elective) care, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has found that despite NHS England (NHSE) spending £3.24bn on transforming diagnostic and surgical services, it has now missed its recovery targets by significant margins, with too many people still waiting too long for tests and treatment. At January 2025, over 6 million people were waiting for elective care, and progress in reducing waiting times appears to have stalled:
The PAC's report states that these failures were driven in part by NHSE's and the government's flawed approach to improving its own services. Billions of pounds in spending were approved by government without sufficient focus on what exactly its funding would deliver and without any focus on outcomes for patients.
Diagnostic transformation received £2.2bn, and £1.04bn went to surgical transformation, at a time of scarcity for capital funding. A shortfall of 3.6m tests led to the missed diagnostics target; for new surgical hubs, only the number of newly delivered hubs was tracked, with NHSE unable to say what contribution they actually made to total elective activity.
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