THE number of patients waiting longer than six months to start planned NHS hospital treatment has now topped 200,000, new figures revealed yesterday.

NHS England referral-to-treatment statistics for May revealed the exact number of patients to be 211,324 — 48.4 per cent higher than at the same time last year.

The total waiting list size is now estimated at 4.3 million.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said newly appointed Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s first test was to “rapidly bring these waiting lists down.”

Mr Hancock has replaced Jeremy Hunt who replaced Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary earlier this week after the latter quit over the Prime Minister’s Brexit plans.

Mr Ashworth went on: “Today, the new Health Secretary learns the reality of what eight years of Tory cuts and privatisation means for patients.”

Royal College of Nursing chief executive Janet Davies said the figures should leave Mr Hancock “in no doubt as to the scale of the task ahead of him.”

And Royal College of Surgeons senior vice-president Susan Hill said six months was too long to wait for treatment, noting that some patients were likely to be in severe pain.

Hospitals must get their waiting lists under control before winter, when the situation could become even worse than last year, she warned.

Other referral-to-treatment statistics reveal that the government’s target of 92 per cent of patients being seen within 18 weeks has not been met since February 2016.

The figures show that 88.1 per cent of patients were seen within 18 weeks, compared with 90.4 per cent during the same period last year.

The figures also show June was A&E departments’ second-busiest month on record.

There were 2,091,318 A&E attendances last month, while the all-time peak — 2,161,779 — was the month before.