Eighteen months ago Wes Streeting promised the country he would end the NHS strikes. Sir Keir Starmer told voters that a Labour government would bring industrial peace to the health service through grown-up engagement with the unions. Today, on 6 May 2026, the UK Strike Action Calendar is tracking 22 active disputes inside the NHS, including escalating action at Airedale NHS Foundation Trust and Barnsley Hospital involving UNITE and GMB. Labour has not ended the strikes. Labour has multiplied them.
From One Strike to a System of Strikes
The pattern is now a structural one. The resident doctors went out for six days at the end of 2025. The BMA has signalled monthly strike threats running into 2026. Junior nursing staff have followed. Now it is auxiliary staff, porters, kitchen staff, hospital cleaners — the people who actually keep wards functioning. The five days of action in December alone produced 95,664 staff absences, and the NHS still managed to deliver 94.7% of elective activity, which is a tribute to the staff but says everything about the underlying capacity that strikes are now eating.
The rolling, multi-front nature of these disputes is the give-away. This is not one pay round gone bad. This is a workforce that has lost confidence in its political masters and is exercising the only leverage it has left. The longer Labour pretends otherwise, the longer waiting lists keep moving in the wrong direction.
Waiting Lists: 7.31 Million and Counting
The RTT waiting list now stands at 7.31 million cases. Only 60.2% of patients are starting treatment within 18 weeks — well below the 92% NHS constitutional standard. The median wait is 13.9 weeks. More than 1 in 7 people in this country are now waiting longer than six months for medically necessary treatment. Cancer waiting time targets are being missed at 65 weeks. The diagnostic backlog stands at 1.68 million. None of these numbers have improved in any meaningful way under Labour.
And every strike day pushes the numbers further out. The clinical leaders running these trusts are telling anyone who will listen that they cannot run an effective service while the workforce is in permanent dispute with the Secretary of State. Streeting's response has been to make speeches about modernisation and to launch consultations. Consultations don't operate hips.
The Real Problem: A Service Designed for the 1940s
I am not anti-NHS. Most of the people on those picket lines are doing extraordinary work. The problem is that the system around them is broken. We have a model of healthcare that hasn't been seriously redesigned since 1948. We pour record sums in. We get worse outcomes than nearly every comparable European country on cancer survival, on stroke survival, on diabetic care. Labour's answer is more money, more strikes, and more apologies.
Patients in Lancashire who have been told they will wait 18 months for routine procedures are now turning to private providers in despair. The Office for National Statistics is tracking record numbers paying out of pocket for treatment. That is not the universal NHS the country was promised. That is a two-tier system in everything but name, where the people who can afford to opt out, do — and the rest queue.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would face the obvious truth: an industrial dispute on this scale needs a settlement, and the settlement must be paid for by structural reform of how the NHS spends, not by yet more borrowing. We would publish a transparent NHS productivity ledger. We would give patients the choice to be treated by any qualified provider on the NHS tariff once they breach the 18-week constitutional standard. We would let GP surgeries genuinely compete on patient list size and outcomes, instead of being squeezed by ICB bureaucracy.
We would also tackle the cause that Labour will not say out loud: demand on the NHS is being driven by levels of unfunded immigration that no health system on earth could absorb at the speed the UK has tried to absorb them. You cannot run a health service for a population growing by 700,000 a year while pretending the population is stable.
Twenty-two active disputes. A 7.31 million waiting list. A workforce that no longer trusts its government. Wes Streeting's NHS is not on the path to recovery — it is on the path to a deeper crisis. The country deserves better than what Labour is delivering, and the staff deserve better than the empty promises that put them on the picket line in the first place.