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The Conservatives are heading into the next general election defending scores of seats with some of the worst waiting times for routine hospital treatment in England, according to a Financial Times analysis.
The seats include constituencies with slim Tory majorities that the opposition Labour party expects to sweep, such as Bury North and Lincoln, as well as deep-blue safe seats held by cabinet ministers.
The analysis underscores the political liability the NHS could pose for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with waiting times now more than twice as long compared with when his party entered Downing Street in 2010.
In May 2010, the median waiting time for patients on the NHS was 5.5 weeks. The median as of February this year was 14.8 and two weeks worse or more in 59 Tory seats, the FT found.
The dysfunctional state of the NHS is a key issue for voters. A recent YouGov tracker poll found 45 per cent of people listed health as one of the three biggest issues facing the country, just behind the economy on 51 per cent.
In March, an analysis from the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust showed overall satisfaction with the NHS falling to 24 per cent in 2023, while dissatisfaction levels were at a record 52 per cent.
The FT analysis matched constituencies to 106 commissioning bodies, known as sub-integrated care boards (sub-ICBs), which allocate NHS resources to provide local health services and for which the NHS provides waiting list data for consultant-led elective care. New constituency boundaries for the next election were used along with the notional results calculated by Rallings and Thrasher.
Bury North is in an area with the second-worst wait time in England, where people can expect a median wait of 19 weeks. The Tory margin in this constituency is just 2.4 per cent. In Lincoln, where the Tory margin is 7 per cent, the median wait is 17 weeks.
The Tories, who have more seats than Labour overall, hold 59 seats in the 20 NHS areas with the worst waiting times, compared with Labour’s 33 seats. Thirty-one of those Conservative-held seats are among the 155 blue strongholds that Sunak’s party has been forecast to hold in recent polls, underscoring the risk to the Tory core from voter anger over the NHS.
These seats include health secretary Victoria Atkins’s constituency of Louth and Horncastle, in Lincolnshire, and the housing secretary Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath seat in Frimley.
Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats plan to put the NHS at the heart of their campaigns. Labour, which currently holds 201 seats, needs 326 seats to secure a majority in the next election.
“Unlike the 2019 campaign, the Conservatives are trying to avoid talking about the NHS at all, so we will shame them into answering for their appalling record,” said one Labour official. “It will be one of two of our top election issues, alongside the economy.”
Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, said: “Conservative MPs will face a reckoning at the ballot box over their disastrous failings on the NHS.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We continue to make huge progress in reducing the overall NHS waiting list, which has fallen by almost 200,000 over the past five months — the biggest five-month fall in the waiting list in over 10 years outside the pandemic.
“This is a significant achievement in light of winter pressures and industrial action.”
According to the latest data, across England patients were waiting for 7.5mn appointments in February, above the 7.2mn treatments outstanding in January 2023 when Sunak made falling queues one of his five pre-election promises to voters. In May 2010, the waiting list stood at 2.6mn.
In part, the prime minister has blamed industrial action over pay across the health service since December 2022 for the record waiting list, but admitted in February his government had “not made enough progress”.
The increase in waiting times was acute even before the pandemic hit the NHS, with growth in demand for healthcare exceeding increases in government funding since the 2008 financial crisis.
“It’s pretty clear as a trend that since the early 2010s, NHS performance has been getting worse”, said Max Warner, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank. “It’s not as if pre-pandemic performance was high.”
Tim Gardner, a policy expert at the Health Foundation think-tank, added: “The decade before the pandemic was the most fiscally austere in the history of the health service.”
Other countries with high rates of funding were able to benefit from years of greater investment when the Covid pandemic struck, he said, which meant waiting lists had not built up as markedly as they had in England.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation which represents health managers, said there was little doubt the NHS would play a “major part” in the upcoming election.
However, he cautioned that since sub-ICB localities often covered areas much larger than a parliamentary constituency, they “can contain large specialist trusts providing services over a much more significant regional footprint, with patients from other trusts sent there for specialist treatment”.
