No one will, or should, put out the bunting to greet the news that public satisfaction with the NHS has risen for the first time since 2019. It’s a six per cent rise, a statistically significant improvement on last year, but it comes from a historic low point and with a caution that, still, only one in four Britons feels satisfied with the service. Nevertheless, if you’re Keir Starmer and you’re looking for a reason to get up in the morning, it’s a pretty solid achievement.

Clearly, it doesn’t amount to anything like a shining new dawn, but it may be something to provide balm for Starmer’s battered and bruised reputation. And it is undeniable that incremental improvements in the NHS – the one institution that we British people have never stopped believing in – is of vastly greater importance to voters than any amount of strutting on the world stage.

When Labour came into power in 2024, Health Secretary Wes Streeting was often heard saying that the NHS was “broken”, attributing this to 14 years of underfunding by successive Conservative governments. And today, buoyed by the results of this latest British Social Attitudes Survey, he said that the NHS “is on the road to recovery”.

Politicians should be careful with their use of language when talking about the NHS. It is an organisation made up of flesh and blood, in more than one sense, and words matter. Talented, committed and experienced individuals – doctors and nurses, porters and orderlies and administrators – come from all around the world to care for us. Their morale is of vital importance. We need them to feel good about their vocation if we are to get the best outcomes. So constantly to tell them that they’re working in a business that is deficient, inefficient and “broken” is unfair and, most importantly, counter-productive.

Much better to adopt the solicitous language of today’s survey, which states that “the message is clear: things are looking up, but from a low base.” Nevertheless, while trust in the institutions of state and faith in politicians has never been lower, we still, as a nation, believe in the founding principles of our health service. When asked whether they thought the NHS should continue to be free of charge when you need to use it, 89 per cent of respondents to the survey answered in the affirmative.

So, can this be Starmer’s legacy? Will he go down in history as the man who, appointment by appointment, operation by operation, restored our faith in the NHS? Covid-19 had left the service weakened when Labour came into power, and the former chief executive of NHS England, Amanda Pritchard, warned in 2023 that it could take up to five years to clear the backlog caused by the pandemic. Progress would be gradual rather than dramatic.

And so it has been the case. The NHS delivered more elective activity in 2025 than in any other year in its history, with 18.4 million treatments and operations. The hospital waiting list has been cut by more than 330,000, with the total backlog continuing to fall.

The percentage of patients waiting over 52 weeks for treatment dropped to just 1.9 per cent — the lowest since June 2020. These are not insignificant numbers. And nor are they mere statistics. Each one is a person who got their hip replaced, their cancer investigated and their heart monitored. Each one is a life improved, even saved.

The British public may remain unconvinced – only 16 per cent of people surveyed felt confident that NHS care would improve in the next five years – and there is much with which to be dissatisfied, from, for example, poor standards of social care to unacceptable delays in A&E. But who can blame the Labour government if they take credit for the small advances reported today?

Certainly, it’s good politics. Investment in a free and equitable health service is a statement of values rather than an act of political expediency and he will be judged accordingly.

“The NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion,” said the late Conservative chancellor, Nigel Lawson, back in 1992. Nothing has happened since to contradict him. In fact, the opposite is true; as the UK population gets older, we are ever more attached to our health service.

Starmer understands this. And he must know that if he is to be more than a footnote in modern British history, he should spend what’s left of his political capital on turning these small steps into giant strides.

© iNews