Rishi Sunak has admitted failing to deliver on his promise to cut NHS waiting lists, and also conceded it is “on the wire” whether he will meet his pledge to grow the UK economy.
The PM last year made cutting the number of patients waiting for treatment one of the five big leadership promises.
On Monday Mr Sunak conceded for the first time that he has not met his target – blaming strikes in an interview with Piers Morgan on TalkTV.
Pressed directly on whether he had failed to meet the pledge, he said: “Yes, we have”, adding: “We have not made enough progress.”
The Tory leader also accepted a £1,000 bet with Mr Morgan that deportation flights to Rwanda will take place before the general election expected in the autumn.
Data analysed last month suggests that, despite recent decreases in the waiting list, it is still higher than when Mr Sunak’s pledge was made. The list stood at 7.21 million treatments waiting to be carried out in January 2023.
In November – a month when there was no industrial action – some 7.61 million treatments were waiting to be carried out. When the increase was put to Mr Sunak by Mr Morgan, he replied: “Yes, and we all know the reasons for that.”
“And what I would say to people is, look, we have invested record amounts in the NHS, more doctors, more nurses, more scanners,” he said. All these things mean that the NHS is doing more today than it ever has been. But industrial action has had an impact.”
A pay deal with striking nurses was agreed last year, but junior doctors and consultants have continued with walkouts. The TalkTV host went on to tell Mr Sunak about his 79-year-old mother’s experience three months ago after having a heart attack.
Mr Morgan told the British leader that, despite being driven to the hospital in an ambulance, she waited on a trolley in an A&E corridor for nearly seven hours to be seen, in a scene she compared to a “war zone”.
The PM said the account was “shocking” and that performance in A&E and with ambulance waiting times were “not good enough”. But he denied that the Tories had failed the NHS since 2010, citing the backlog created by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We can’t escape that,” he added. When you shut down the country in the NHS for the best part of two years, that has had an impact on everything since then. And we just have to recognise that reality.”
Mr Sunak also admitted that the economy may not have grown last year – another of his big five promises – as he was grilled on his five priorities.
He said: “I think we have made good progress on the economic ones, which are the first three – to halve inflation, grow the economy and reduce debt.”
But the PM acknowledged that it was “on the wire” whether the economy had grown or stagnated – arguing that either outcome was better than the recession some had feared.
“We are on the wire of ‘has it grown a little bit, has it broadly stayed flat’, but fundamentally what was predicted was a year-long recession where the economy shrank by quite a lot,” he claimed. “I am confident that we will be able to keep growing the economy.”
Grilled if he could take credit for the reduction of inflation to 4 per cent, marshalled by the Bank of England, Mr Sunak replied: “I do, because I don’t think these things happen by accident.”
Asked about his pledge to reduce government debt, the Tory leader said: “It is massively on track to happen, and it has got even better.”
Mr Sunak was criticised for accepting a £1,000 bet with Mr Morgan that deportation flights to Rwanda will take place before the election later this year.
Rishi Sunak blamed his failure to cut waiting lists on industrial action in the NHS
