PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
(13 May 2026)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Answer of 29 April 2026 to Question 82312 on Hospitals: Waiting Lists, what were the monthly figures for October 2025 to April 2026.

Asked by:
Steve Barclay (Conservative)

Over 85% of removals from the Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting list are recorded as completed pathways. This includes patients starting their first definitive treatment, starting a period of active monitoring, a clinical decision not to treat, or a patient declining a treatment.

The remaining 15% are known as unreported removals, capturing data not submitted in completed pathways. They can reflect issues with timing (such as activity happening at the very end of the month), reporting, and data quality, as well as certain instances where patients are removed from the waiting list through validation because they no longer need to be treated.

It is the record levels of elective activity being delivered by National Health Service staff that is now getting the waiting list down. Completed pathways were 5.9% higher in the 21 months from July 2024 to March 2025 (around 1.54 million per month) than in the previous 21 months from October 2022 to June 2024 (around 1.45 million per month).

Across the same periods, and in all recent years, unreported removals have remained relatively constant proportions of all removals and are now lower (14.4% on average since July 2024) than before the pandemic (approximately 17%).

The requested data has been provided in the table below, taken from the monthly Referral to Treatment (RTT) Waiting Times publication.

Year	Month	Completed Pathways	Unreported Removals	Total Removals	Unreported removals as a percentage of total clock stops
2024	July	1,598,491	255,257	1,853,748	13.8%
2024	August	1,404,465	223,086	1,627,551	13.7%
2024	September	1,516,823	260,758	1,777,581	14.7%
2024	October	1,660,478	268,754	1,929,232	13.9%
2024	November	1,557,283	247,609	1,804,892	13.7%
2024	December	1,335,075	231,009	1,566,084	14.8%
2025	January	1,591,510	266,553	1,858,063	14.3%
2025	February	1,458,339	256,589	1,714,928	15.0%
2025	March	1,535,984	245,442	1,781,426	13.8%
2025	April	1,450,094	286,883	1,736,977	16.5%
2025	May	1,500,695	289,637	1,790,332	16.2%
2025	June	1,558,632	257,791	1,816,423	14.2%
2025	July	1,648,945	271,150	1,920,094	14.1%
2025	August	1,404,088	209,442	1,613,530	13.0%
2025	September	1,617,383	243,722	1,861,105	13.1%
2025	October	1,677,869	245,037	1,922,905	12.7%
2025	November	1,536,543	260,299	1,796,842	14.5%
2025	December	1,426,850	234,643	1,661,493	14.1%
2026	January	1,569,063	268,283	1,837,346	14.6%
2026	February	1,516,631	261,553	1,778,184	14.7%
2026	March	1,711,408	351,835	2,063,243	17.1%
Total		32,276,648	5,435,332	37,711,980	14.4%

Full data for completed pathways is available at the following link, with data for April 2026 becoming available from 11 June 2026:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/

Answered by:
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