The British Social Attitudes survey 2025 suggests Labour is once again turning around the NHS after a decade of decline under the Tories – although there is room for improvement for dentistry and A&E departments
Landmark polling suggests the NHS is finally on the long road to recovery.
The first full year of the Labour government in 2025 saw the greatest fall in dissatisfaction in the NHS in over a quarter of a century – since New Labour’s first full year in power in 1998.
The British Social Attitudes survey has been carried out every year for over 40 years and is considered the gold standard assessment of how the public experience health and care in this country.
However the poll of 3,400 people from England, Scotland and Wales showed dissatisfaction is still at historically high levels, particularly for A&Es and dentistry.
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The latest annual poll conducted by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) showed 51% of respondents reported being “very” or “quite” dissatisfied, marking a drop of 8% from 2024. Analysis by The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust health thinktanks showed it is the sharpest annual decline since a drop of 15% in 1998 when it fell to 35%.
Health Wes Streeting said: “When this government came to office, I said that, while the NHS was broken, it wasn’t beaten. Patients are beginning to feel the change and the NHS is showing that things can get better. The biggest drop in dissatisfaction since 1998 doesn’t happen by accident. It is thanks to the government’s investment and modernisation- all of which has been hard fought but is now delivering results.”
Dan Wellings, senior fellow at the King’s Fund, said: “The rise in public satisfaction will be welcome relief for an NHS that has seen satisfaction plummet in recent years. But whether this marks the start of a genuine recovery or is just brief respite remains an open question.
“Much will depend on how quickly the government can improve access to care. Frustration with waiting times remains deeply embedded, and many people still feel that access to NHS care is difficult – either it is too hard to get through the front door or they are in a queue that barely moves.”
Last year 26% of people said they were ‘very’ or ‘quite’ satisfied with the NHS – up 6% on previous year. However it comes after a historic collapse in public confidence from 60% in 2019, reaching a record low of just 21% in 2024 during the final years of Tory rule.
It comes as the NHS waiting list for planned care in England is at its lowest in almost three years but waits in A&E are still rising. Before then the elective waiting list had been on an upward trend for a decade, passing three million treatments in 2014, four million in 2017, five million in 2021 and peaking at 7.8 million in 2023.
Despite this historic turnaround under Labour, waits to be seen in A&Es are still at near record levels after an explosion in numbers waiting over 12 hours in the last decade. Mr Streeting said: “Waiting lists are the lowest they’ve been in three years, more patients in A&E are seen within four-hours than for four years, and ambulance response times are the fastest for five years. The NHS is on the road to recovery, but there’s a lot of road ahead. My foot is pressing down on the accelerator and I won’t stop until the job is done.”
Mark Dayan, head of public affairs at the Nuffield Trust, said that the proportion of people satisfied with the NHS was “only about a quarter of the population”, indicating that the public was still “very unhappy”. He said: “These are still numbers that you would have thought were catastrophic in the 2010s, they’re still worse than they were even during the ’90s, a period when the public was widely perceived to be very unhappy about the NHS. So there is a very, very long way to go.”
Sir James Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, said: “Staff right across the NHS have put a real shift in over the past year, helping drive waiting lists down to their lowest level in almost three years, cut A&E waiting times and making it easier to contact a GP – all of which has happened whilst living within our financial means for the first time in a number of years.
“To see that those efforts are starting to have an impact on how people are feeling about the NHS is really encouraging and testimony to what’s been achieved over the last year, especially on the back of years of decline in public sentiment about the health service.” He added: “None of us can be complacent, but today’s data shows we are on the right track.”
