Sajid Javid says NHS waiting lists will not begin to fall until March 2024, as No 10 begins mini reshuffle – live

Turning away from the Sajid Javid statement, the reshuffle has started, Sky’s Sam Coates reports.

Chris Pincher, housing minister and a former deputy chief whip, is seen as a possible new chief whip, replacing Mark Spencer. Pincher is one of the Johnson loyalists who have been running what is reportedly called “Operation Save Big Dog”, the effort to stop triggering a no confidence vote in the PM.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has got a new job. He was leader of the Commons, but is now minister for Brexit opportunities and government officiency. The No 10 announcement says he will be a minister of state but a member of the cabinet.

Effectively this is a sideways move. As leader of the Commons, Rees-Mogg had a higher profile. But technically he only attended cabinet, rather than attended as a full member, and so in one respect he is moving up.

His new job roughly corresponds to Lord Frost’s Brexit minister post, although (perhaps for understandable reasons) Rees-Mogg does not seem to have been given any responsibility for negotiating with the EU.

Boris Johnson has been under pressure for some time from Brexiters to embrace the opportunities offered by Brexit more enthusiastically. Remainers argue that said opportunities are fairly minimal (at best).

Turning away from the Sajid Javid statement, the reshuffle has started, Sky’s Sam Coates reports.

Chris Pincher, housing minister and a former deputy chief whip, is seen as a possible new chief whip, replacing Mark Spencer. Pincher is one of the Johnson loyalists who have been running what is reportedly called “Operation Save Big Dog”, the effort to stop triggering a no confidence vote in the PM.

In his opening statement Sajid Javid said that 10m was the number of people who stayed away from the NHS during the pandemic, contributing to the backlog now. He did not explicitly say he expected the backlog to rise to up to 10m, as an earlier post said. I have corrected that now and included Javid’s full quote. See 12.41pm.

This is from the Health Service Journal summarising the key announcement from Javid.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, told Javid his elective recovery plan “falls seriously short of the scale of the challenge facing the NHS and the misery that is affecting millions of people stuck on record high NHS waiting lists”. He said:

We’ve been waiting some time for his plan to tackle NHS waiting times, we were told it would arrive before Christmas, we were told it would arrive yesterday, and it’s not clear from his statement today that the delay was worth the wait.

There’s no plan to tackle the workforce crisis, no plan to deal with delayed discharges and no hope of eliminating waits of more than a year before the general election in 2024.

The only big new idea seems to be a website that tells people they’re waiting a long time, as if they didn’t already know.

What we did hear was a series of re-announcements including some perfectly sensible proposals for community diagnostic and surgical hubs – we welcome those – but the secretary of state cannot pretend that they meet the scale of the challenge.

In response, Javid accused Streeting of playing politics, and nurturing his own leadership ambitions.

Third, Javid says tackling the waiting list will also give the NHS an opportunity to deliver more flexible personalised care.

And, fourth, he says he wants to introduce more transparency. He says the My Planned Care platform announced yesterday should achieve this, by allowing people to get more information about their planned surgery, “putting patients at the heart of their care”.

Javid says the government has already allocated an extra £2bn to tackle waiting lists this year, with another £8bn being spent over the next three years. And he says it is also spending £6bn on capital investment in the NHS

He says the plan comprises four elements.

First, there will be a focus on increasing capacity. The NHS already has more doctors and nurses then ever before, he says.

Second, the NHS will prioritise the longest waiting lists. He says by March 2024 the government expects the waiting list to be reducing.

By April 2023 waits lasting longer than 18 months should be eliminated, and by March 2024 waits lasting longer than 65 weeks should also be gone, he says.

Javid also restates the targets announced yesterday.

UDPATE: Javid said:

Assuming half of the missing demand from the pandemic returns over the next three years, the NHS expect waiting lists to be reducing by March 2024.

Addressing long waits is critical to the recovery of elective care and we will be actively offering longer waiting patients greater choice about their care to help bring these numbers down.

The plan sets the ambition of eliminating waits of longer than a year, waits in elective care, by March 2025.

With this no one will wait longer than two years by July this year and the NHS aims to eliminate the waits of over 18 months by April 2023 and over 65 weeks by March 2024.

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, is making a statement to MP on the elective recovery plan – the plan to tackle the NHS waiting list backlog generated by the pandemic.

He says that before the pandemic there were 4.4 million people on a waiting list. He says that total is now up to 6 million, but that the NHS estimates it could rise to 10 million.

UDPATE: Javid said:

1,600 people have waited longer than a year for care before the pandemic. The latest data shows that this figure is now over 300,000.

On top of this, the number of people waiting for elective care in England now stands at six million – that is up from 4.4 million before the pandemic.

Sadly, this number will continue rising before it falls. A lot of people understandably stayed away from the NHS during the heights of the pandemic, and the most up-to-date estimate from the NHS is that that number is around 10 million people.

I want these people to know that the NHS is open. I want them to come forward for the care they need.

At the No 10 lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesman confirmed that a mini-reshuffle is coming this afternoon. He said “a small number of changes” would be announced at ministerial level.

Steven Swinford from the Times has summarised some of the moves we’re expecting.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who represents the seat once held by her murdered sister, Jo Cox, told Radio 4’s Women’s Hour that Boris Johnson’s failure to apologise for his Keir Starmer smear was “absolutely the wrong thing to do”. Johnson was only interested in saving his own skin, she said.

I don’t think Boris Johnson is interested in listening to me. He didn’t welcome me to parliament when I got the job.

I’ve had very little to do with him. He did eventually write a note to me.

But I don’t think Boris Johnson wants to listen to people like me.

I think he wants to save his skin and he wants to make sure that he is still prime minister and, at the moment, it feels like that’s pretty much all he cares about. And I find that really sad.

This is from Dan Hodges, the Mail on Sunday columnist, on Boris Johnson’s Jimmy Savile smear.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has joined opposition MPs, and some Tories, in suggesting there was a link between what Boris Johnson said about Keir Starmer last week and Starmer being hounded by a mob yesterday. In a statement to MPs he said he had asked for an update from the police about the incident. He said:

I deplore the fact that members of this house were subjected to intimidating and threatening behaviour while simply doing their jobs.

I know the whole house will join me in saying that we stand with our colleagues in condemning the behaviour they and the police experienced.

While I do not comment in detail on security matters on the floor of the chamber, steps must be in place to keep passholders secure as they enter and leave the parliamentary estate.

I have requested a situation report from the Metropolitan police via our security team on how this incident occurred.

Commenting on the link between the abuse levelled at Starmer and Johnson’s comment last week, Hoyle said he had already described Johnson’s language last week as inappropriate. He said:

I know it has been reported that some abuse was directed at the leader of the opposition yesterday related to claims made by the prime minister in this chamber.

But regardless of yesterday’s incident, I made it clear last week that while the prime minister’s words were not disorderly they were inappropriate.

As I said then, these sorts of comments only inflame opinions and generate disregard for the house and it is not acceptable.

Our words have consequences and we should always be mindful of the fact.

The Scottish Conservatives are set to publish a policy paper today, with one of the main recommendations to wind down Scotland’s test and protect scheme, PA Media reports. PA says:

The “Back to Normality” document will call for the end of contact tracing in the coming months, with funds instead re-directed towards bolstering the NHS.

The Scottish Tories also said the performance of test and protect has declined in recent months, adding that the requirement for confirmatory PCR tests after a positive lateral flow test being dropped has made the scheme “less useful”.

Peers are attempting to block plans which could prevent women who are fleeing rape, forced marriage, trafficking or female genital mutilation from securing refugee status – a move that critics say was sneaked into the nationality and borders bill. My colleague Diane Taylor has the story here.