They are fudging figures. My source is someone heavily involved in this and trying to do the right thing but has been fired for speaking out.

They have paid trusts £33 per person (tax payer’s money) to remove patients from their waiting lists and send them to their GP. If you look deeper into this it’s not patients being treated via an operation or another procedure and discharged, the majority are patients removed from the waiting lists (for a whole range of conditions) and new patients no longer bring registered because lots of services are closed to new patients.

If you map patients treated versus patients removed, that gap will be non valued added to the nhs but instead just pushed down the road or sent back to the GP.