More than 20,000 children in England are having to wait a year or more for consultant-led treatment on the NHS, the UK’s top child health group has said.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said the ‘unfathomable’ number represented an increase of almost 10% compared to last month’s data.

There are 21,282 children awaiting treatment for more than 52 weeks, with a total of 416,790 on Referral To Treatment (RTT) waiting lists in England.

Dr Camilla Kingdon, the president of the RCPCH, said many of those children will be seeking ‘time critical’ care, adding that prolonged waits ‘not only impair children’s mental and physical development, but also have a detrimental impact on their education and overall wellbeing’.

The news came as the number of people waiting for NHS treatment in England hit a new record high of 7.47 million – an increase of around 50,000 since March.

Cutting the waiting list was one of the five key pledges announced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in January.

Dr Kingdon said: ‘Today’s data merely confirms what we already know – that there is a fundamental lack of understanding nationally that investment in children has to be a priority.

‘This is primarily for the sake of these patients, but more broadly that healthy children become healthy adults and when we lose focus on childhood there is a cost to society.

‘Policy makers, workforce planners and politicians need to wake up and understand that.’

She said an estimated 220,000 children were waiting for vital community services such as mental health, speech and language and neurodiversity assessments.

They were not included in the NHS figures, as they do not include community paediatrics.

Dr Kingdon added that the College was ‘stunned’ to learn last month’s NHS workforce plan ‘notes a 92% increase in adult nursing training places, and inexplicably 0% for child nursing training places’.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘This government is working to cut waiting times and the NHS is treating record numbers of patients each day.

‘We have virtually eliminated 18-month waits, and are taking immediate action to improve urgent care, getting 800 new ambulances on the road, adding 5,000 hospital beds and scaling up virtual wards.

‘The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan – backed by over £2.4 billion – will put us on a sustainable footing, including by nearly doubling the number of doctors and nurses in training by 2031.’

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