Here’s what Anas Sarwar said in June 2024:
Anas Sarwar has accused the SNP of “breaking” the NHS as he set out Labour’s plans for the health service, should the party win the general election. The Scottish Labour leader said a government led by Sir Keir Starmer would cut waiting times and increase access to GPs.
We see today, above, from the BMJ, Sir Keir’s failure.
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s756
Comparisons with NHS Scotland can be very tricky, not least because NHS England restarts the clock after triage when the patient is allocated to a department whereas NHS Scotland counts from when you arrive at the A&E reception.
However, we do have, from an FOI, for 2023, the figure of 7,367 patients who waited over 24 hours in A&E.
All things being equal, you might then expect the NHS England figure in 2023 to have been around 74 000 but it was 377 986, around 5 times as many.
Have Labour changed that damning ratio?
There no published data we can use directly.
To get a reasonable estimate for the 2025 figure, we could use the published ‘over 12-hour waits’ in 2023, 2024 and 2025, to estimate what has happened to the ‘over 24 figure’ since then.
From FOI data (2023): ~7,367 patients waited ≥24h vs “tens of thousands” ≥12h (≈60k–70k range that year)
This implies a rough ratio: ≥24h ≈ 10–12% of ≥12h waits and get a maximum of around 9 200.
Using that maximum, we get an anticipated NHS figure of 92 000 but it was 493 751, still more than 5 times as great
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