NHS to miss targets for cutting A&E wait times and performance in England | NHS

The NHS will miss key targets to reduce waiting times for emergency department help, cancer care and planned hospital treatment, leaving millions of patients facing persistently long delays.

Healthcare in England will not offer a range of services milestone improvements Guardian analysis of the NHS’s latest data has revealed the performance ministers have called for to be achieved by the end of the financial year on Tuesday.

The lack of progress raises questions about health minister Wes Streeting’s promises last week that parliament would normalize significant waiting times by the end of 2029.

The findings will concern Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Labor Party’s commitment A strong desire to “get the NHS back on its feet” and for the public to end routinely long waits for care from 2015.

The bleak picture of waiting times comes despite the NHS giving hospitals an extra £120 million in recent weeks to fund a pre-deadline “elective sprint” of extra appointments and more surgeries to improve the chances of making the necessary improvements by March 31.

Streeting has repeatedly promised that 92% of people waiting for non-urgent hospital care, such as appointments and surgeries, will receive it within 18 weeks by 2029. But the NHS only saw 61.5% of patents filed within 18 weeks in January. This was above the performance of 58.9% in January 2025 but still too low to meet the year-end target of 65% for 2025-26.

Only 52 (one-third) of the service’s 150 trusts managed to deliver 65% performance in January.

Additionally, 112 trusts, accounting for 70% of the total, did not submit an additional requirement to improve their performance by at least 5% compared to the previous year. The position, which was 44 trusts at the 18-week standard, has deteriorated due to unremitting demand for care and a major NHS budget contraction.

The service is also off track to meet its year-end target of increasing the proportion of A&E patients treated within four hours. It was said that it would provide 78% performance by March 31. But in February it achieved this with just 74.1% of A&E arrivals; This rate is still below the 78% target.

Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokeswoman, said: “These missed targets have very serious humanitarian consequences. Patients will now face long delays for the care they desperately need because the NHS is not fully functioning.”

“Labour promised the world but has delivered too little in our NHS. Patients are still miserable in corridors, unable to get to a GP and waiting too long for treatment. This is the biggest of Starmer’s broken promises.”

Guardian analysis also revealed the NHS will miss a deadline to increase “category two” ambulance response times for 999 calls, which include stroke and heart attack calls, to 30 minutes on average.

In January, response times improved but were still 30 minutes and 25 seconds. Six of England’s 11 ambulance trusts met the target but five missed it. The 30-minute target by the end of 2025-26 is intended to be one step in a series of annual improvements that will help the NHS reach the official target of 18 minutes once again.

More positively, the NHS is improving patients’ satisfaction with getting GP appointments, another key target this year, which is a common NHS priority for the public, alongside prompt A&E care.

Tim Gardner, deputy policy director at the Health Foundation, said: “Recent progress is encouraging, but it will take a massive effort to deliver on the government’s commitments to reduce waiting times.”

“It is a question of whether the current ‘sprint’ will be enough to meet this month’s provisional target, with significant variation across the country and some trusts struggling to even meet this target,” he added.

Predictions by the think tank suggest Labor will fail to deliver on its pledge to ensure the NHS provides elective hospital care for 92 per cent of patients by 2029.

Speaking on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast last week, Streeting stressed that the government would not only achieve this target but also return to four-hour emergency care, with cancer patients receiving their first treatment within 31 or 62 days and ambulances arriving eight or 18 minutes after an emergency call, depending on the severity of the illness or injury.

He did so hours after his speech in which he emphasized that “for the first time in the 15 years since the government came to power, waiting lists have decreased by 374,000 people”. This, and an initial rise in public satisfaction with the NHS – albeit only up to 26% – showed that Labour’s medicine had brought in £26bn of extra funding and the 10-year health plan had helped revive the NHS.

Labor inherited a waiting list where 6.3 million people were waiting for 7.62 million treatments. But by January, that number had dropped to 6.13 million patients, with 7.25 million waiting for episodes of care.

“Overall, some progress has been made [on waiting times since Labour took office in July 2024]. But this was coming from an incredibly low base and was already trending upward,” said Stuart Hoddinott, deputy director of the Institute for Government think tank.

“More importantly, additional funding and staffing do not translate into rapid improvements in performance,” he added.

Meanwhile, separate analysis shows that the number of people waiting for diagnostic tests in England has reached 1.8 million – the highest number since the Covid outbreak – and delays in getting x-rays or scans are limiting the NHS’s ability to address the still-huge care burden.

Research from Magentus, a firm that works with NHS diagnostic services, also found:

• The number of people having to wait more than 13 weeks for a test – well above the default maximum of six weeks – has risen to 139,652, the highest number since January 2024.

Marlen Suller, Magentus’ managing director of clinical diagnostics, said: “Diagnostic waiting lists are still growing, which can mean worrying waits for many patients. A test or scan is the starting point of many people’s journey through the healthcare system and delays at this stage can delay everything. This can mean a longer wait for treatment to start, and people who do not need further care cannot be discharged and safely removed from the waiting list.”

An NHS spokesman said: “Analyzing old data misses the fact that the NHS is now working hard to meet its targets and has improved dramatically since the end of January. NHS weekly management information shows this effort has brought us within striking distance of the 18-week target with two weeks to go. We have delivered a record number of appointments, tests and scans in 2025, reducing the waiting list to the lowest level in three years and waits lasting a year. A record number of cancer patients will be seen and treated, as well as the lowest in almost six years.” fell to its lowest level.”