Labour came to office promising to fix the NHS. One year on, the waiting list in England sits at around 7.5 million people — nearly one in seven of the entire population stuck in a queue for routine treatment. That is not a health service that is recovering. That is a health service that has been allowed to drift.

A Waiting List the Size of a Nation

Let the number sink in. Seven and a half million people waiting for hip replacements, knee operations, scans and consultations. Behind every entry on that list is a person in pain, a worker signed off sick, a family putting their life on hold. This is the human cost of a system that successive governments have managed by press release rather than by results.

Labour told voters they had a plan. The plan was more money, more targets, more announcements. What they did not have was the courage to confront the unions or the competence to make the money count. The list has barely moved, and the people of Preston East and every other constituency are the ones paying for it — in waiting, in worry, and in worsening health.

Strikes Labour Cannot Stop

From 7am on Monday 15 June, resident doctors who are members of the British Medical Association walk out again, with strike action running until 7am on Friday 19 June. We have been here before. The last round of strikes saw more than 100,000 appointments cancelled — operations scrapped, clinics shut, patients sent home.

A government that cannot keep the hospitals open is not in control of the health service. Labour spent years cheering on industrial action from the opposition benches. Now they sit in office and find that the militants they encouraged will not go quietly. The result is chaos, and it is patients who suffer for it.

Money In, Results Out — Nowhere

We are told the answer is always more money. But Britain already spends enormous sums on the NHS, and the waiting list keeps growing. The problem is not that we do not care. The problem is that the system rewards bureaucracy over treatment. Layers of management, wasted procurement, and a refusal to reform working practices swallow the cash before it ever reaches a ward.

Throwing money into a broken model does not fix the model. It just funds the failure. Until someone is willing to confront how the money is actually spent, every extra billion will vanish and the list will grow.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would put patients first and bureaucracy last. We would cut waste in NHS management and redirect that money to frontline treatment. We would tackle the waiting lists head-on by using every bit of available capacity to clear the backlog, and we would reward the doctors and nurses who actually treat patients rather than the administrators who do not.

Above all, we would tell the truth: the NHS does not need another slogan. It needs leadership willing to reform it. Labour will not provide that. They never have, and on the evidence of this past year, they never will.