According to figures released by NHS England today, the government has not yet met its goal of eliminating 18-month-plus hospital wait times in England.
By April, Rishi Sunak intended to eliminate 18-month waits. At the end of June, 7,177 individuals had been waiting for treatment for more than 15 months, a decrease from 11,446 at the end of May.
NHS England figures reveal that 383,083 people waited more than a year for hospital treatment in June.
At the end of June, 383,083 individuals in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to begin routine hospital treatment, a slight decrease from the end of May’s figure of 385,022.
The government intends to eliminate all wait times longer than 52 weeks by next spring.
The number of patients awaiting hospital care in England reaches a new record high of 7.6 million.
PA Media reports that the number of patients awaiting routine hospital treatment in England has reached a new record high. PA states:
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”.
Grant Shapps informs Conservatives that net zero is crucial to global security
Excellent morning. Since the byelection in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in which the Tories unexpectedly retained the seat due to a voter backlash against the extension of Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone), which will impose additional costs on some drivers, the Conservative party has significantly toned down its support for green measures.
Even posing for a photograph in Margaret Thatcher’s old Rover, Rishi Sunak pledged to “max out” the United Kingdom’s oil and gas reserves.
The energy secretary, Grant Shapps, has, however, expressed some opposition this morning. Shapps asserts that there will be no global security without net zero, a statement that may be aiming as much at his own party as at the larger world.
In an interview with Politico, Shapps stated that the United Kingdom will host a global summit on energy security in the spring of 2024. Shapps stated that the committee would discuss the need to “diversify away from fossil fuels” and he stated:
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.
He stated that the United Kingdom and other nations would be more secure with alternative energy sources. “Much greater security could actually result from greater diversity,” he stated.
Everything seems quite apparent. In the Conservative party, and especially in the Tory press (the Sunday Telegraph is calling for a referendum on net zero), these are not, as a better writer would have phrased it, universally acknowledged truths.
Shapps suggested in his interview that China may be invited to the conference. He stated that the specifics were not yet finalized, but he stated that it would be “inclusive in nature.” If China is invited, some members of his party may react negatively.
We are in the middle of August, which is typically a dead period for Westminster political news, but there are a few stories pertaining to net zero. The TUC has published a report on the potential benefits of a publicly owned energy company, and former environment secretary George Eustice has given an interview in which he calls on the government to change its plan to prohibit the installation of new oil boilers in off-grid homes beginning in 2026.
Lee Anderson’s appeal for migrants to “fuck off back to France” is still being discussed for the third consecutive day. In Northern Ireland, the board overseeing the Police Service of Northern Ireland confronts the chief constable, Simon Byrne, about the massive data leak. And Labour has accused the government of “catastrophic financial mismanagement,” claiming it has “lost” £251 billion of the value of assets created to rescue the banking sector following the 2008 financial crisis. Here, Phillip Inman has the story.
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