The education secretary and Labour’s deputy leader Lucy Powell MP said on BBC Question Time last week that there were seven million people on NHS waiting lists when Labour was elected. She added that this meant seven million people were “not able to work properly”.
That’s not correct. Fewer people than that were on the waiting list in England, many of them were children or over 65, and many of them wouldn’t have had a condition that affected them in this way. A separate Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey in September 2024 found that only about 15% of adults on a hospital waiting list said it had negatively affected their employment.
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How many people were waiting?
Ms Powell said: “Seven million people on NHS waiting lists when we got elected. That’s seven million people not able to work properly, many of whom [were] not working at all because they can’t get their operation.”
NHS England’s figures for the end of June 2024, the latest from around the time Labour took office, show there were about 7.6 million cases on the waiting list for planned hospital treatment in England, involving about 6.4 million people. (In the latest data at the time of writing there are about 7.4 million cases involving about 6.2 million people.)
There are always more cases than people, because some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing. We wrote about this issue before when Ms Powell made a similar claim about the number of “people” on NHS waiting lists in February 2025.
When Westminster politicians talk about “the waiting list”, they generally mean the “referral to treatment”, or RTT, waiting list for England specifically, because this is the part of the health service that the UK government controls. We’ve written more about this and other measures in our NHS waiting lists explainer.
How many couldn’t ‘work properly’?
The first thing to be clear about is that many people on the waiting list aren’t of working age. So if they are not working, or not working “properly”, this may have nothing to do with their condition. According to an analysis of NHS England data by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “44% in May 2024 were under 16 or at least 65, with the remaining 56% of working age”.
What’s more, many of those waiting and of working age may not have a condition that affected their ability to work.
An ONS survey in September 2024 found that, among adults in Great Britain who said they were on an NHS hospital waiting list—including those over 70—15% said their employment had been negatively affected while they waited. The figures for the age bands of those of working age ranged from 14% to 29%, although these came from small samples of respondents, making them less reliable.
This survey doesn’t overlap exactly with the people on the elective NHS England waiting list, as it covers the whole of Great Britain and didn’t ask which list the respondents were on. But it is good evidence that at least some on the waiting list do not report any effect on their ability to work.
Analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in 2023 also suggested that bringing down the NHS waiting list would be likely to have a “relatively small” impact on participation in the labour market. The report noted that “many of the treatments being waited for appear unlikely to have a clear impact on work capability”.
Being on the waiting list does stop some people working altogether. The OBR estimated that around 650,000 working-age adults on the list in 2022 were economically inactive due to long-term sickness, although it said the waiting list “looks unlikely to have been a significant causal driver” of rising long-term sickness inactivity.
Full Fact has approached Ms Powell and the Labour Party for comment.
