December’s NHS figures were truly shocking.

It should take an ambulance 18 minutes to attend someone who has had a heart attack or stroke.

In December the average wait was more than an hour and a half – the longest ever recorded by more than half an hour.

Ipswich Star: Hospital stock

In the East of England it was even worse with an average wait of two hours six minutes.

This is just the average, so some people will have waited much longer for treatment where every second counts.

For the first time ever, more than half the people who attended A&E waited for over four hours to be seen and assessed.

Once they had been assessed, nearly 55,000 people waited 12 hours to be admitted into the hospital – another all-time record.

It has been estimated that delays in A&E are currently responsible for up to 500 unnecessary deaths every week.

The number of people waiting for NHS treatment now stands at over 7 million. Over 400,000 of those have been waiting over a year.

More than 12,000 people with cancer have waited for over three months for treatment.

Let’s just remember what the NHS standards set by the last Labour Government were.

No one to wait more than 18 weeks for treatment. No one to wait more than two months for cancer treatment. No one to wait more than 4 hours in A&E. A GP appointment within two days. Everyone to have access to an NHS dentist.

Every single one of those is being missed now – and not just by a little bit.

In 2010 the NHS was independently judged to be the best healthcare system in the world. After twelve years of the Conservatives in charge it is now the worst performing in Europe.

The Government blames Covid for the NHS’s collapse on their watch. The virus has undoubtedly caused huge strains worldwide, but no other major economy’s health care system has struggled as badly as the NHS under the Conservatives.

The reason is not because Britain was worse hit by Covid – remember the Government used to brag that it had rolled out vaccinations quicker than any other country – but the decade of underinvestment up to 2020 which left the NHS uniquely exposed to any external shock.

It’s not just the NHS. Social care, the courts, the migration system, the railways, even driving tests – you name it, if this Government is in charge of it, it isn’t working properly.

I can’t help comparing this to the problems Ipswich Borough Council faced maintaining its council houses following Covid.

During strict lockdown no work at all could be done repairing homes and getting empty ones ready for occupation. Then social distancing rules meant that we could not have multiple people working on different jobs in a house at the same time, so repairs were taking longer. On top of that, because people were spending a lot more time in their homes, more things were getting broken.

This all led to a backlog in repairs with people waiting much longer than normal.

To tackle this we brought in extra capacity from private contractors to supplement our inhouse team. We reviewed working practices to reduce delays in the system. We instituted a programme of inspections to reduce the number and severity of repairs and improve the state houses are handed back in at the end of a tenancy.

All through this we focused on what was important so that, although the wait for non-urgent repairs was higher than usual, urgent emergency repairs were still completed on time.

The result is that we have now eliminated the backlog of work and are back to levels seen before Covid.

It’s not rocket science and is the sort of programme that needs to happen in every public service.

But we had one major advantage over the Government: we had consistently invested in our housing stock and our workforce in the decade before Covid. Our houses were in good condition. We didn’t already have a backlog. We weren’t carrying big vacancies because our staff could get paid better stacking shelves in a supermarket.

This Conservative Government’s complete and utter inability get anything working properly after Covid has been appalling but, in large part, they are now having to deal with the consequences of their own failure to invest in public services for the 10 years prior to the virus hitting.