Fact check: NHS waiting lists have fallen for six months in a row

The Labour Party shared a graph on social media which it said showed that under Labour “waiting lists (have been) falling for 6 months in a row”.

Evaluation

The claim that waiting lists have fallen for six months in a row is correct, however the accompanying graph which the party posted raises concerns.

The graph does not label the y-axis (the vertical axis) and also “truncates” it – a practice which makes changes appear bigger than they actually are. In addition to this, the graph appears to stitch together two separate datasets into the same line.

The facts

What does the data show? 

The overall NHS waiting list fell for the sixth month running in February, new data from NHS England showed on April 10.

The number of patients waiting dropped to 6.24 million, down from 6.25 million the previous month, while the number of treatments they are waiting for fell to 7.40 million, down from 7.43 million.

A spreadsheet uploaded by NHS England shows the number of treatments on the waiting list stood at 7.64 million in August 2024.

The estimated number of unique patients on the list is always a little lower because some people are waiting for more than one treatment.

While the number of treatments waiting to be carried out fell in each of the six months from September 2024 to February 2025 inclusive, the number of patients waiting for treatment did not.

This number fell in September, October, November and December, then rose slightly in January 2025, before falling in February to its current total of 6.24 million.

What are the issues with Labour’s graph? 

There are three problems with the graph, which runs from January 2024 to January 2025, excluding the latest figures for February.

Firstly it does not label the vertical axis (also known as the y-axis). This means that readers cannot tell what the lines actually show.

Secondly the y-axis of the graph has been truncated without this being made clear to readers. Truncating a graph means that the axis does not start at zero, which has the effect of making small changes appear more dramatic.

Truncating is a legitimate way of presenting a graph, however it has to be made clear to readers that is what has been done.

The amount of truncation in Labour’s graph makes the drop in the line look very dramatic, despite the fall in the number of treatments waiting to be carried out between August 2024 and January 2025 only being 3%.

The third problem with Labour’s graph is slightly more complex. It appears to have stitched together two different data sets into the same line.

As explained above, there are two main waiting list figures. One measures the total number of patients waiting, and the other measures the total number of treatments they are waiting for.

Labour’s graph appears to have used the data for the number of patients for the first section of its line, and the data for the number of treatments for the second section.

The data used in Labour’s graph from January 2024 to July 2024 – the blue part of the line – appears to match those from the dataset measuring the number of patients on the waiting list.

This becomes obvious when looking at the figures for February and March 2024, with Labour’s graph clearly showing a small drop between those two months.

This matches the dataset on the number of patients, which fell from 6,292,058 in February 2024 to 6,288,589 in March 2024.

It does not match the number of treatments dataset, which saw a small rise between those months from 7,536,907 to 7,538,830.

But the second half of the data in Labour’s graph – the red part of the line, corresponding with Labour’s period in government – seems to be taken from the dataset showing the number of treatments on the waiting list.

This seems clear when looking at the months of September and October.

In Labour’s graph, these two months show a fairly large drop.

This is not consistent with the dataset for the number of patients on the waiting list, where the figure fell by a comparatively small amount, from 6,342,737 in September 2024 to 6,341,718 in October 2024.

However the graph is consistent with the other dataset, showing the number of treatments on the list, where numbers fell more sharply from 7,571,549 to 7,541,373 between September and October.

Further evidence that the second half of Labour’s graph shows the number of treatments and not the number of patients, can be seen at the very end of the graph.

Here the line continues to fall between December 2024 and January 2025.

This is consistent with the number of treatments dataset, which fell from 7,463,403 to 7,428,309.

But it is inconsistent with the number of patients dataset, which records a rise from 6,235,352 to 6,252,306 in the same months.

This all means that Labour appears to have used two different datasets in its graph, stitching together the unique patient data for the period that the Conservatives were in charge with the number of treatments data from when Labour was in charge.

The graph does not make it clear that this is what has been done.

The graph is labelled as “size of NHS waiting list” with a smaller text saying “number of cases waiting to start treatment. Source: NHS England.”

It is unclear why Labour elected to present the graph in this way.

The party did not respond to requests for an explanation.

Links

Labour’s post on X (archived)

NHS England – Over three million additional appointments delivered (archived)

NHS England – Spreadsheet showing RTT timeseries (archived)

Science Direct – Truncating Bar Graphs Persistently Misleads Viewers (archived)

About PA’s fact checks

If you have any suggestions for future fact checks, objections or comments, please send them to factcheck@pamediagroup.com, including any relevant links. For more information on how to submit a correction or dispute a rating, please refer to our Corrections and complaints policy