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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots.

The spectator's daily politics podcast, I'm Max Jeffrey and I'm joined by James Forsyth

and Isabelle Hardman.

New NHS figures for waiting times in A&E came out today showing that more than 29,000 patients

waited more than 12 hours in the emergency department.

Isabelle, just how bad are these numbers?

They are really, really bad.

So you've got a total of 6.7 million people waiting to start treatment at the end of June

and that was up from 6.6 million in May and the highest since records began in August

2007.

And then you've got the number of people waiting for more than a year to start.

Their hospital treatments stood at 355,774 in June up from 331,623 the month before.

And as you say, there's around 30,000 people having to wait more than 12 hours in

accident and emergency and really bad ambulance response times as well.

So they took almost an hour on average to respond to emergency calls in England last

month.

Now that's probably not a shock given the sort of anecdotal evidence that's been emerging

in the press and from MPs dealing with these cases in their constituencies, but it's

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