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Health Secretary Wes Streeting's multi-billion spending programme to cut waiting lists, is so far failing to meet its aims and his plans to reform the NHS could end up repeating the failures of other large-scale projects like HS2, a report by MPs has warned.

A report published on Wednesday by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee is highly critical of how the £3.24 billion already spent by the Government on cutting waiting lists has failed to meet its own targets.

Instead waiting lists, until last month, have risen since Labour came to power and MPs blame the Government and NHS management for a flawed approach to improving care.

The report found that nearly 192,000 patients were waiting over a year for care by July 2025 - a length of wait which should have been eliminated by March.

For diagnostic tests, 22% of patients were on a waiting list for more than six weeks - against a target of five per cent by March 2025.

When it comes to treatment, only 59% of patients were treated within the statutory standard waiting time of 18 weeks, against a target of 92%.

Clive Betts MP, Labour Deputy Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "Every unnecessary day that a patient spends on an NHS waiting list is both one of increased anxiety for that person's unresolved case, and if they are undiagnosed, a steady increasing of risk to their life.

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"Every penny of funding spent to put the NHS back on a pre-pandemic footing must be precisely targeted, or the system itself becomes an obstacle to proper care.

"Unfortunately, our report establishes that billions have been poured into the system over the past few years without the requisite focus on making sure that money does what it was intended for - improving outcomes for patients. The rollout of shiny new surgical hubs and diagnostic centres will only be superficially impressive if they are not used in the most productive way."

The report is also highly critical of the rush by Mr Streeting to reform the NHS - which involves abolishing NHS England and 50 per cent cuts to local health boards. There seems to be no paperwork on the strategy of how to do it. The report compares this to former Conservative leader Boris Johnson's failed plan to build 40 new NHS hospitals and its planning for the HS2 railway.

Clive Betts said: "Alarmingly, in the Government's approach to the absorption of NHSE and 50% cuts to local health boards, we are now seeing chilling echoes of past failures on HS2 and the New Hospital Programme."

The government will have to pay hundreds of millions of pounds for redundancies and it is not clear how this will be funded since the Treasury may not want to pay the bill.

MPs are also sceptical that digitalisation will solve everything. They say it should not be seen as a "cure all" for all its problems.

The report says: "While NHS England and the Department for Health and Social Care have outlined an ambitious programme for future change, the current picture of performance for transformation is poor. The integration and sharing of digital records across the NHS is a key weakness and the NHS lacks some of the basics in IT connectivity, with General Practitioners, hospital trusts and consultants still working on different systems."

Some hospital trusts have bucked the national trend. Written evidence from Guys and St Thomas's NHS Trust in London to MPs show that a consultant-led initiative had cut waiting operation times from 61.5 weeks in June 2024 to 33.5 weeks in July this year - a reductio...