Keir Starmer's government came to office promising to end the NHS strikes that defined the last years of the Conservatives. Two years on, the picture tells a different story. Resident doctors walked out yet again from 7 to 13 April 2026, and across the 2025/26 round of industrial action an estimated 171,776 appointments and procedures were lost. Every one of those is a real person whose operation, scan or consultation was cancelled.
The Strikes Labour Said It Would Stop
Let's give credit where it is due first, because the public deserves honesty, not spin. The waiting list has actually come down. It fell to around 7.11 million in March 2026, the lowest in three and a half years, and frontline staff deserve enormous credit for keeping nearly 95% of normal activity running even during walkouts. That progress is real, and it is built on the dedication of nurses and doctors, not the brilliance of ministers.
But here is the problem. That progress is happening despite the strikes, not because the government has resolved them. Labour negotiated, paid out, and declared the dispute over, and the doctors walked out again anyway. A government that cannot keep the peace it claims to have made has not solved the problem. It has simply paid more and got less.
Patients Pay for Political Weakness
Nearly 172,000 cancelled appointments is not an abstraction. It is the grandmother whose hip replacement slips another three months. It is the worker whose diagnostic test is pushed back. Behind the statistic is pain, anxiety and lives put on hold. The NHS Confederation itself has warned that industrial action cannot be allowed to drag on, and that ministers and the unions must get back round the table for a lasting settlement.
Instead we get the worst of both worlds: a Chancellor handing over more money, and patients still seeing their care cancelled. That is what happens when a government negotiates from weakness and confuses signing a cheque with showing leadership.
Money Without Reform Is Money Wasted
The deeper truth is that you cannot fix the NHS by pouring ever more cash into a structure that has not been reformed for a generation. Productivity matters. Management matters. Getting value for the vast sums already spent matters. Labour's only instinct is to spend more, and more, and the strikes prove that even that does not buy industrial peace.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would back the frontline staff who actually deliver care while demanding the reform that successive governments have ducked. That means cutting the layers of bureaucracy that sit between funding and patients, rewarding productivity, and refusing to let the service be held hostage by repeated walkouts. Patients come first. Process comes last.
The British people are deeply proud of their health service. They are also tired of watching it run on crisis management. They deserve a government that can actually keep its promises, not one that announces peace and delivers another strike.