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Hello and welcome to Coffey House, The Spectators Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Bals and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and Kate Andrews.

So there are new figures today on waiting lists and the length for routine treatments.

They're around 7.54 million in February and this has quickly led to many saying

that patients are still having to wait too long and they are still higher than when

Rishi Scenic pledged to bring them down at the start of 2023.

Isabel, is it fair to say this is one of those five priorities we hear about less

where perhaps number ten are the most open about failure?

Yeah it is and you've seen today and yesterday Victoria Atkins health secretary and the

Prime Minister both being pretty I think open about the

fact that they aren't meeting this pledge so Atkins was being interviewed on the radio this

morning and said I don't think anyone could have

thought it was an easy promise to make and that it was going to be easy to achieve.

Now that definitely wasn't the tone that Ritchie Sunakouniak took when he made those pledges.

And the reason I think that you've got this candor from ministers about this is that you've

had industrial action and so there's something that they can very clearly point to and they have

done that says well you know we could have made much more progress had doctors and you know

...