Patricia Hewitt may have offered an unequivocal denial that cost-cutting was impacting on hospital waiting time targets, but the facts detailed in the email seen by The Times tell a different story.

The very existence of the email, sent out to trusts across England, indicates the concerns within the Department of Health that just 48 per cent of patients are being treated within the 18-week target from GP referral.

The Department’s advice on how to present this, and other details, to the media in the best possible light show the level of concern.

It was advice followed by Ms Hewitt herself this morning on the Today programme. Refuting The Times's revelations as "absolute rubbish", Ms Hewitt said that the new assement of waiting times was calculated in a far more transparent way.

No-one questions that this is a commendable improvement. However it does not address the real issue - that hospitals around the country are having to sideline efforts to meet the target because of the more pressing imperative to cut costs.

The 48 per cent figure is not, as Ms Hewitt suggests, only limited to one part of the country, but represents the national average across England .

Ministers insist that the final target, and an interim demand that 85 per cent of patients be treated within 18 weeks by next March, can still be met. But there are signs that progress on waiting times has halted - and even reversed - in the past financial year.

Although waiting times have gradually reduced over a decade, the latest assessment from the Department of Health shows that 16,200 patients in England were waiting more than five months for their operations at the end of March, an increase of 1,100 (7.1 per cent) from the previous year and far exceeding the 18 week target.

This increase has coincided with a series of drastic cutbacks in the NHS, putting pressure on staff, training budgets and other services. Examples of cost-cutting have varied from the severe to the ridiculous, with tales of one hospital being told to take out every other light bulb. But there are serious implications.

Several hospitals have cancelled or outsourced non-essential operations as a result of the financial strain, and with doctors' morale at an all-time low, it is hardly surprising that the climate has appeared to curb progress towards the 18-week target.

The latest figures give the clearest indication yet of progress. It is the first time information on what the Department of Health calls the complete "patient journey" has been made available, as opposed to individual strands such as wait from decision to admit for surgery to actual inpatient treatment.

As such, it is difficult to compare the leaked figure - which shows that 52 per cent of patients waited longer than 18 weeks before being treated - with previous baseline estimates that around two thirds of patients were waiting longer than 18 weeks in December.

When Patricia Hewitt claims that waiting lists are at an all-time low and have been slashed since the last Conservative Government, she is correct, but measured against Labour's own standards and years of record-spending in the health service, progress on the 18 weeks target seems very slow indeed.

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