http://www.performance.doh.gov.uk/waitingt...

The link "Historical Time Series" (.xls file) gives you a spreadsheet of waiting times, going back to 1987 with the number who were waiting more than a given number of weeks.

Waiting times used to be a problem; but it became a political problem, so governments (both Tory and Labour) started measuring hospitals on it, and giving them some more money, and the times have come down a lot as a result.

So, for instance, in 1987, 826,000 were on an inpatient waiting list, and 207,000 had been on it for more than 12 months. That slowly started getting better around 1989. By the time Labour got in in 1997, the total waiting list was 1,190,000; over 12 months 47,000. By June 2003, the TWL was 993,000, and over 12 months just 220; by April 2006 it seems no-one had a waiting time of more than 9 months, and the total waiting list is now under 600,000.

Or you can look at the median and mean waiting times:
1988 21.7 45.3
1993 13.8 19.6
1998 14.8 20.0
2003 11.9 15.6
2008 4.5 5.6

There are similar figures for times between a GP refering someone for an outpatient appointment, and them being seen; Sept 2008 the median wait time was 2.6 weeks, mean 3.2 weeks; in 2004 (1st time the published median and mean), it was 5.2 and 5.9 weeks. At the worst, in Sept 1999, over 512,000 people had been waiting for an outpatient appointment more than 13 weeks; that figure is now just 686.