Number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England reaches new record high at 7.6m – UK politics live | Politics

The government still has not achieved its target of getting rid of hospital waits in England lasting more than 18 months, today’s NHS England figures show.

Rishi Sunak wanted to eliminate 18-month waits by April. But the figures show that at the end of June 7,177 people had been waiting more than a year and a half for treatment, down from 11,446 at the end of May.

Today’s NHS England also show that 383,083 people in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of June – down very slightly from 385,022 at the end of May.

The government wants to eliminate all waits lasting more than 52 weeks by spring next year.

The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, PA Media reports. PA says:

An estimated 7.6 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of June, up from 7.5 million in May, NHS England said.

It is the highest number since records began in August 2007.

Rishi Sunak has made cutting waiting lists one of his priorities for 2023, pledging in January that “lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”.

Good morning. Since the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection, in which the Tories held the seat unexpectedly following a voter backlash against the extension of Ulez (the ultra low emission zone), which will impose extra costs on some drivers, the Conservative party has been toning down its support for green measures considerably. Rishi Sunak even resorted to posing for a photograph in Margaret Thatcher’s old Rover, and promising to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves.

But this morning there has been a bit of pushback from Grant Shapps, the energy secretary. In remarks that may be aimed as much at his party as the wider world, Shapps says there will be no global security without net zero.

Shapps made the comment in an interview with Politico in which he said that the UK will be hosting a global summit on energy security in spring 2024. Shapps said it would discuss the the need to “diversify from fossil fuels” and he declared:

We can’t have global security without net zero … There’s no global security if millions of people are having to uproot because of weather patterns.

The UK, and other countries, would be more secure with alternative sources of energy, he said. “Greater diversity could actually give us much greater security,” he said.

All of this sounds quite obvious. But in the Conservative party, and particularly in the Tory press (the Sunday Telegraph is calling for a referendum on net zero), these are not truths universally acknowledged, as a better writer would have put it.

In his interview Shapps also implied China might be invited to the conference. He said the details had not been finalised, but he declared he wanted it to be “inclusive in nature”. If China is invited, that may go down badly with some in his party too.

We are into the middle of August – normally death valley for Westminster political news – but, in so far as there are stories around, some of them relate to net zero. The TUC has published a report on the potential benefits of having a publicly owned energy company, and George Eustice, the former environment secretary, has given an interview about his call for the government to change its plan to ban the installation of new oil boilers in off-grid homes from 2026. For the third day in a row, Lee Anderson’s call for migrants to “fuck of back to France” is still being talked about. In Northern Ireland Simon Byrne, the chief constable, faces questions from the board overseeing the Police Service of Northern Ireland about the massive data leak. And Labour has accused the government of “catastrophic financial mismanagement”, claiming it has “lost” £251bn from the value of assets created to rescue the banking sector after the 2008 financial crash. Phillip Inman has the story here.

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