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Hospitals in England that deliver the fastest improvements in waiting times for care will be rewarded with a share of millions of pounds in extra investment for buildings and equipment, Wes Streeting will announce on Monday.
The move by the health secretary is intended to incentivise NHS leaders to achieve a target that 92 per cent of patients wait no more than 18 weeks to begin non-urgent treatment after referral to a consultant.
Last month Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer injected new urgency into the standard, first set in place by Tony Blair two decades ago, when he named it as one of six “milestones” for his administration and vowed it would be met by the end of the current parliament.
But the yardstick has not been achieved for almost 10 years, as austerity, the pandemic and rising demand from an ageing and growing population added to strains on the health service.
Ahead of Monday’s announcement, health department officials told the Financial Times that extra funding for capital projects — such as high-tech new scanners or much-needed ward maintenance — would be available to NHS trusts that made the biggest improvements in meeting the 18-week referral to treatment standard.
Performance would be measured by the percentage of patients seen within that timeframe, they said.
The lure of extra capital funding will resonate in a service that has long lagged comparable countries in the sums invested in infrastructure.
In a government-commissioned report last year, Lord Ara Darzi, a surgeon and former health minister, identified a capital shortfall of about £37bn.
Streeting said some hospital trusts were already leading the way, carrying out surgery “in innovative, more productive ways. This government will back them with new capital investment, and let them motor through the backlog”.
Trusts that treated more patients should be paid more for their work “and good performance should be rewarded to incentivise great performance — that is how we will drive waiting times down”, he added.
The proposal will form part of an elective reform plan, to be published on Monday by the government and the NHS, which will set out how the NHS will return to the 18-week standard.
The drive is being backed by £25.6bn announced for the NHS in the October Budget. Ministers say the extra money will help fund an additional 2mn appointments within a year, but health leaders have warned of “confusion” over whether to prioritise hitting performance targets or the winter surge in admissions.
At the end of October, the most recent figures available, patients were waiting for 7.54mn procedures and appointments. About 40 per cent of people had been waiting longer than 18 weeks.
Pressures on the NHS were underscored by data on Friday showing a sharp rise in flu cases over the festive period. More than 5,000 patients were admitted to hospital with the virus at the end of last week, almost 3.5 times higher than the same week in 2023.
Ministers are also facing a backlash from campaigners and opposition parties after Streeting on Friday said a new commission studying how to overhaul social care would not make its final report until 2028.
It is more than a quarter of a century since the release of the first of several major inquiries into social care, which has long weighed heavily on the NHS but was barely mentioned during the 2024 general election.