One of government's biggest boasts is not what it seems

"The target was never particularly ambitious," says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) about Labour's plan to add two million extra NHS appointments during their first year in power.

In February, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced they had achieved the feat early. He recently described the now 3.6m additional appointments achieved in their first eight months as a "massive increase".

PM signs Chagos deal - politics latest But new data, obtained by independent fact checking charity Full Fact and shared exclusively with Sky News, reveals this figure actually signalled a slowing down in new NHS activity. There was an even larger rise of 4.2m extra appointments over the same period the year before, under Rishi Sunak's government.

The data also reveals how unambitious the target was in the first place. We now know two million extra appointments over the course of a year represents a rise of less than 3% of the almost 70 million carried out in the year to June 2024.

In the last year under Mr Sunak, the rise was 10% - and the year before that it was 8%. Responding to the findings, Sarah Scobie, deputy director of independent health and social care think tank the Nuffield Trust, told Sky News the two million target was "very modest".

She said delivering that number of appointments "won't come close to bringing the treatment waiting list back to pre-pandemic levels, or to meeting longer-term NHS targets". The IFS said it was smaller than the annual growth in demand pressures forecast by the government.

What exactly did Labour promise? The Labour election manifesto said: "As a first step, in England we will deliver an extra two million NHS operations, scans, and appointments every year; that is 40,000 more appointments every week." We asked the government many times exactly how it would measure the pledge, as did policy experts from places like the IFS and Full Fact. But it repeatedly failed to explain how it was defined.

Leo Benedictus, a journalist and fact-checker at Full Fact, told Sky News: "We didn't know how they were defining these appointments. "When they said that there would be more of them, we didn't know what there would be more of." Even once in government, initially Labour did not specify their definition of "operations, scans, and appointments.