The latest British Social Attitudes survey has been released, with 26 per cent of British adults satisfied with how the NHS runs. This is a 6 percentage point increase from 2024 and the first increase in satisfaction since 2019.
2025 was also the largest fall in dissatisfaction for 25 years, falling from 59 per cent in 2024 to 51 per cent in 2025.
The British Social Attitudes survey has been carried out every year since 1983 by the National Centre for Social Research. The 2025 survey was carried out between 26 August and 6 October 2025.
Satisfaction with individual NHS services and waiting times for NHS care remain low, but there have been no significant changes between 2024 and 2025.
35 per cent of people aged 65 and over were satisfied, while only 20 per cent of people under 35 were.
Most respondents reported that the founding principles of the NHS should ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ apply in 2025: that the NHS should be free of charge when you need to use it (89 per cent), the NHS should primarily be funded through taxes (81 per cent) and the NHS should be available to everyone (74 per cent).
Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said: "When this government came to office, I said that, while the NHS was broken, it wasn’t beaten. Patients are beginning to feel the change and the NHS is showing that things can get better.
"The biggest drop in dissatisfaction since 1998 doesn’t happen by accident. It is thanks to the government’s investment and modernisation- all of which has been hard fought but is now delivering results.
"Waiting lists are the lowest they’ve been in three years, more patients in A&E are seen within four-hours than for four years, and ambulance response times are the fastest for five years.
"The NHS is on the road to recovery, but there’s a lot of road ahead. My foot is pressing down on the accelerator and I won’t stop until the job is done."
Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, will say: "Right now, a cluster of high-performing Trusts are masking some chronic under-performance in other parts of the country. Failure has been tolerated for too long. Staff know it. Patients feel it. And I won’t stand for it.
"We won’t have succeeded in changing the NHS, until we change it for the patients who are suffering the worst services in the country.
"In some places, so many years of poor service without improvement is feeding that sense of fatalism. They believe that after so long, it just can’t get better – in fact, they’ve never seen it get better.
"That’s why I’ve announced today a new Intensive Recovery programme. This will target the worst performing providers, sending in our best leaders or delivering the structural changes necessary to get them back on track. No more turning a blind eye to failure."
