Rishi Sunak has admitted his key pledge to bring down NHS waiting lists is in doubt after latest figures show a record 7.68m people are waiting for routine hospital treatment.
The Prime Minister said it was “very hard” to meet his targets due to strikes by NHS staff including junior doctors and consultants.
In January, Mr Sunak pledged to bring down waiting lists before the next election as one of five key promises of his premiership.
Since that target was set, the number of people on the list has risen every month. The 7.68m figure relates to people waiting for a routine operation in July, and is set to climb even higher.
Mr Sunak told the BBC: “Well obviously that is challenging with industrial action. There’s no two ways about it.
“We were making very good progress before industrial action.”
Asked whether it was possible he would miss the waiting list target, the Prime Minister said: “Well with industrial action it’s very hard to continue to meet these targets, but what I would say is we are making very good progress despite industrial action.”
However, NHS waiting lists were already high in England before strikes by NHS workers began around a year ago, mainly due to the backlog caused by the Covid pandemic.
Industrial action by nurses and ambulance workers was resolved earlier this year but junior doctors and consultants are still staging walkouts over pay.
Professor Philip Banfield, chair of the British Medical Association, urged the Health Secretary Steve Barclay to return to the negotiating table to bring an end to the strikes.
He said: “It’s obvious the Health Secretary has no plan at all to put an end to strikes. He appears to be ‘hoping that doctors will give up’.
“This is simply not going to happen. Doctors have worked tirelessly to do what they can with rising waiting lists for over a decade, due to chronic underfunding, then saved lives through a pandemic in horrendous and often brutal conditions.
“You cannot run down the health service over 10 years, devalue the expertise of doctors and expect our resolve to stand up for patients to dissipate magically.”
