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

I'm Isabel Hardman, and this is the Sunday roundup.

Another seasonal crisis looms for the NHS,

meaning a difficult start for the new Health Secretary of Victoria Atkins.

And despite Ritchie Sunak pledging to reduce the hospital waiting list,

it has continued to grow.

Atkins told Laura Coonsburg that more money than ever before was going into the NHS and the government was using that money to increase its workforce.

She implied that recent industrial action was partly to blame for the long waiting list despite seeing

a graph that showed a steady increase in its size since 2010.

Let's just show people what's happened to the numbers because it's important to understand

that I try and explain that context. This is what has happened to waiting lists.

We know of course the pandemic made things much more challenging, but our viewers can see it was going up well before the

pandemic. Lots more money has gone in. There are many, many

more staff. This is the situation that people like Lynn are having to deal with.

So if I may just try and explain some of this so you're absolutely right to explain more money than ever before going into the NHS and we have deployed that on trying to get more people into the NHS.

So this week we met our manifesto promise that we would recruit a

further 50,000 nurses into the NHS that is great news that we've been

able to achieve that. And there's still tens of thousands of vacancies but I'd'd like you to address it because this is the Prime Minister's target and it's going the wrong way.

In terms of waiting list, so we have all these, the plans that we have in place to deal with urgent emergency

care to deal with

what is called electives in other words people that are coming in for non-emergency

care but we do have to acknowledge that the impact of the industrial action has really had an impact on waiting list.

...