After 14 years of Conservative Party government in the UK, many more people are waiting to access medical care, and for longer.
The NHS waiting list for treatment referrals in England reached 7.6 million cases in April – a threefold increase since 2010.
Treatment referral numbers show the number of cases of patients awaiting elective care. As patients may be waiting for multiple treatments, the actual number of people on the list is smaller – around 6.3 million.
Of the 7.6 million cases, more than 302,500 people involved have been waiting more than 52 weeks. About 50,400 cases waited more than 65 weeks and almost 5,000 involved waits of more than 78 weeks.
The average waiting time was 13.9 weeks, up from 5.2 weeks in March 2010.
Accident and emergency waiting times have also increased, with the percentage of people seen within the four-hour benchmark falling from around 97 per cent at the end of 2010 to 74 per cent last month.
Waiting lists in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which have largely autonomous healthcare systems and measure waiting times differently, have also risen sharply.
The figures paint a stark picture of the decline of public services in the UK as voters head to the polls on July 4 in an election dominated by concerns about living standards and national decline.
With dissatisfaction with the status quo running high, the Conservatives appear to be headed for defeat at the hands of Keir Starmer’s Labor Party, which for months has led in the polls by around 20 percentage points.
Why has the NHS deteriorated?
Most of the backlog has accumulated since the COVID-19 pandemic, when health systems in many countries were stretched to the limit.
But the NHS waiting list had been growing steadily for years before the pandemic. In December 2019, the waiting list was 4.6 million – around double the number under the previous Labor government.
Much of the explosion in waiting times has been attributed to chronic underinvestment resulting from years of austerity implemented in the wake of the 2007-08 global financial crisis.
Although NHS funding has increased every year since 2010, the rate of increase has slowed substantially. While spending has risen by around 6% every year under Labor when adjusted for inflation, it has only risen by around 2% under the Conservatives, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Not only does this fall short of the Labor Party’s investment, it is well below the annual average of 3.6 per cent dating back to 1949-50, just after the founding of the NHS in July 1948.
Furthermore, despite global increases in funding, salaries for NHS doctors and nurses have declined when adjusted for inflation, falling by 9.3 per cent and 10.5 per cent respectively.
Meager pay and poor conditions were seen as the main drivers of staff retention problems in the NHS, which saw a record 169,512 staff resign in 2022.
A report published by think tank The King’s Fund last year concluded that the UK had the second-worst death rates from preventable causes among 19 wealthy nations, in part due to below-average investment that resulted in fewer beds, folks. and scanners than its peers. countries.
The Health Foundation think tank warned last week that the NHS would need far more investment than promised by either the Conservatives or Labour, suggesting that addressing the backlog and improving services in England would require £38 billion. dollars) more annually than planned.
In addition to funding issues, the UK population has also aged and become more obese, putting more pressure on existing resources and contributing to a sharp rise in mortality from diseases such as diabetes and dementia.
What about other public services?
The news isn’t much better. From local government to housing, services have deteriorated across the board.
Since 2018, eight councils, including the UK’s second-largest city Birmingham, have issued 114 notices declaring they are unable to balance their books and are effectively bankrupt.
Only two councils issued such a warning between 1988 and 2018.
Half of councils across the UK have warned they are likely to be forced to take the same measures over the next five years.
According to an IFS analysis, per capita funding for councils fell by 18 per cent in real terms compared to 2010, as a result of spending cuts during austerity.
For potential homeowners, buying a home has become significantly less affordable, with the average price last year reaching 8.3 times income, compared to 6.8 times income in 2010.
Home ownership rates in England for those aged 45 to 59 and those aged 35 to 44 fell by 7.1 percentage points and 6.5 percentage points respectively, although ownership increased slightly between those aged between 25 and 34.
The rise in unaffordability has been driven by housing shortages, which economists attribute to an inflexible and unpredictable planning system.
England’s 434 homes per thousand population puts it below the OECD average of 487, and far behind countries such as France and Italy with 590 and 587 respectively.
In education, per-pupil spending has stagnated, while capital investment has fallen by about a quarter, according to the IFS.
“The rot has been going on for a long time, but it has gotten much worse over the last 14 years of austerity,” John Muellbauer, professor of economics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera.
“The lack of investment in infrastructure, when the government could have taken out loans to invest at real interest rates close to zero, was an act of continuous vandalism,” added Muellbauer.
“The obsession with gross government debt in relation to GDP [gross domestic product]ignoring the assets side of the government’s balance sheet, is an ongoing problem and promises to harm the new government as well.”
How do Brits feel about the state of affairs?
Britons are increasingly disillusioned with the way their country is governed.
Just 67 percent of Britons said they were satisfied with their public services, infrastructure and environment last year, a drop of 12 percentage points from 2011 (the first full year of Conservative government), according to Gallup polls.
Britons’ satisfaction with the availability of quality healthcare has seen the most dramatic decline, falling from 92 percent in 2011 to 66 percent last year.
Satisfaction with housing accessibility fell by 18 points, while satisfaction with education and public transport fell by 5 points and 7 points, respectively.
“The British are rational about this. Things are actually getting worse,” Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioral sciences at the University of Warwick, told Al Jazeera.
“Partly due to the staggering expenses of financing half of the country’s citizens through COVID, partly due to Putin’s invasion that caused high inflation, and partly because there is still low productivity that began after the 2008 financial crisis, the our nation is feeling an existential grip. This shows up in a lot of research data.”
Is the UK simply following the international trend of growing public discontent?
Yes and no.
Public trust in government has been declining in democratic countries for decades, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, Oswald said.
“After World War II, in both nations, government officials and politicians enjoyed great trust – around 70-80 percent of citizens trusted the government. Now the numbers are only approximately 20% of citizens,” he said.
“So the 67 percent satisfaction figure for infrastructure, public services and the environment is actually not that bad and may be an overestimate of how good people feel in this country, because we currently know that many fed up citizens and disaffected are refusing to answer survey questions, which is one of the reasons why Brexit predictions went wrong.”
Even so, the United Kingdom has seen an especially pronounced drop in satisfaction with the country’s management.
In 2011, the United Kingdom had some of the highest levels of satisfaction with public services in Western Europe, tied with Germany and ahead of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria, according to Gallup.
In 2023, the country ranked last among its Western European peers.
Other surveys confirmed the particularly pessimistic mood in the United Kingdom.
In an opinion poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this month, 78 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom rated the economy as “bad” – the seventh highest percentage among the 34 countries surveyed.
Meanwhile, 35 percent of Brits expressed an unfavorable view of both Labor and the Conservatives – up from 28 percent of Americans last year who said they viewed the Republican and Democratic parties negatively.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
