After years of grim records, the NHS in England finally has some good news to report. The waiting list for planned hospital care has begun to edge down, and the share of patients treated within the 18-week target has climbed, from 59.8% in March 2025 to around 63% a year later. Ministers, who have promised to restore the 92% standard by 2029, are keen to claim momentum.

Until recently, it was difficult to say whether that recovery was reaching everyone equally. That changed in July last year when NHS England began publishing waiting-time data broken down by deprivation, age, sex and ethnicity for the first time. New analysis of this data by the Health Foundation, an independent health policy charity, gives us some answers.

The charity found that, nationally, the differences are narrow. In April 2026, 62.5% of people living in the most deprived areas had waited less than 18 weeks, compared with 63.6% in the least deprived. That 1.1 percentage point gap is the smallest since the NHS began publishing this breakdown, down from around 1.8 points in June 2025.

It would be easy to file that under “problem largely solved”. But a percentage point stops looking small when you work out what it means for real patients.

That 1.1 percentage point gap may sound small, but it amounted to around 7,400 people in the........

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