The numbers are out and they are damning. NHS England has confirmed that strikes in 2025/26 cost the health service 171,776 appointments and procedures. That is not a statistic. That is 171,776 individual British patients pushed further down a queue they should never have been in.

Labour promised that bringing the unions into the room would end the strikes. They were going to fix the NHS. They were going to settle the disputes. Eleven months on, the BMA has rejected another pay offer, junior doctors are threatening monthly walkouts, and the government is wrestling with 22 active industrial disputes across the NHS workforce. The strikes haven't stopped. They have multiplied.

A Promise Made in Bad Faith

When Wes Streeting walked into the Department of Health, he told the country he could deliver what the Conservatives could not: industrial peace. He gave the resident doctors a 22% pay deal and called it the end of the dispute. It bought him about six months. The doctors came straight back for more. Now they are threatening to strike every single month through 2026.

This was always going to happen. You cannot buy off militant unions with one-off concessions. You set a precedent. You signal weakness. And every other workforce group in the NHS — radiographers, nurses, paramedics, consultants — looks at what the doctors got and asks why they should accept less. That is not industrial relations. That is a hostage negotiation that never ends.

The Real Cost: Patients

171,776 lost appointments means a cancer patient whose scan slipped by three months. It means a pensioner whose hip replacement was bumped into next year. It means a parent waiting for a child's diagnosis. The waiting list may have dipped to 7.11 million, but every strike day adds to it again. Labour wants the credit for the headline figure while quietly piling new misery onto patients behind the scenes.

And the NHS itself has been clear about the cost. The strikes have cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds in cancelled theatre time, locum cover, and rescheduling. That is money that should be going on diagnostics, on equipment, on community care. Instead it is being burned to clean up the mess Labour created by signalling that the strike weapon works.

What the Public Sees

The British public are not fools. They can see what is happening. They were told the NHS was safe in Labour hands. They were told the strikes would end. Now they see the strikes getting worse, the disputes proliferating, and the Health Secretary resigning from the cabinet. Wes Streeting walked out earlier this month. He took the credit for the pay deal and left someone else to clean up the consequences.

This is a government that confuses giving in with solving a problem. A pay deal is not a settlement when the union walks straight back to the picket line. It is a down payment on the next strike.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK believes the NHS must work for patients, not for permanent industrial confrontation. We would set a clear, transparent multi-year pay framework tied to inflation and productivity — no more cliff-edge negotiations every spring. We would legislate to ensure minimum service levels during strikes so that emergency, cancer and urgent care never stop. And we would end the cycle of one-off backroom deals that signal to every workforce group that militancy pays.

Patients deserve a health service that treats them. Not one that treats them as collateral damage in a political game Labour cannot win.