Healthcare
Social care
“I thank the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for her excellent opening speech—it was what we expected, given her unparalleled experience and knowledge in this area. As we have heard over and over again, our A&E departments are at breaking point and ambulance services have been overwhelmed. The corridor care data, which was finally released last month, confirmed the extent of this crisis, well after the end of what we would consider to be the winter peak. Corridor care is no longer a phenomenon confined to the winter months; it is a year-round crisis. I have no doubt that the recent heatwaves will have put unbearable pressure on services yet again. The scale of corridor care has a huge impact on patients. Some 36% of visitors to hospitals have seen care delivered in a corridor. A freedom of information request by the Liberal Democrats revealed that the average hospital trust now sees nearly 3,000 patients wait more than 24 hours in A&E each year. Corridor care is also extremely detrimental to staff. A 2025 Royal College of Physicians survey found that 78% of doctors had provided care in a temporary space. In testimonies collected by the Royal College of Nursing, nursing staff described patients deteriorating unnoticed and suffering avoidable harm. They expressed their anxiety and demoralisation at the level of care they were able to give and being unable to guarantee patient safety, because corridors are unsafe for patients and unsafe for staff, too. Staff are losing hope, and corridor care has become so normalised that one hospital advertised for a dedicated corridor care nurse. Another, as we have heard, even created a makeshift ward in an on-site Costa Coffee. The Government owe it to patients and staff to make fixing this crisis an urgent priority. Even the release of corridor care data was a shambles, arriving late after months of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), paying lip service to transparency and delaying its publication. Concerns have already been raised over loopholes in the Government’s definition of corridor care, which anecdotal evidence suggests has encouraged trusts to hide the true extent of the crisis, with treatment being pushed back into ambulances to avoid incidents being labelled as corridor care. University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS trust had no patients being treated in corridors, while ambulance crews were providing care in its car parks, according to a recent West Midlands ambulance service board paper. Increasing ambulance handover times will not tackle the indignity of corridor care, but will only compound it and prevent the release of those ambulances to people with potentially life-threatening conditions. The corridor care data, which is the best we have got, revealed that May alone saw a shocking 90,000 incidents of corridor care. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s recent report estimated that long waits caused at least 15,860 excess deaths in England in 2025. All of the evidence is there. The royal colleges have been sounding the alarm for years. Data and reports demonstrate the huge scale of this scandal. Countless individual stories remind us of the personal tragedies behind the numbers. One of my constituents, a carer for three adult sons, called after a truly awful experience last year. His eldest son had collapsed on the stairs in the middle of the night. After calling 999 and being told no ambulance was available for some time, my constituent drove his son to A&E himself with some difficulty, and only once his son had regained consciousness. They waited in A&E for 28 hours to then be put in a holding area for one and a half days before being transferred to a ward. Each of these numbers and cases involves a person. Madam Deputy Speaker, it could be your child, an elderly relative or a vulnerable friend—each experiencing no privacy, no dignity and suffering poor outcomes. I look forward to hearing the Government’s plan to resolve this crisis. The Liberal Democrats have an action plan to fix corridor care. We believe that hospital capacity is a key issue, and that cannot be fixed without fixing social care. One of the biggest factors behind lack of capacity is the lack of social care. Baroness Casey’s final report is not due until 2028, and I hope that the Minister will be able to announce that the Secretary of State will bring that forward, so that we can solve the social care crisis. Without those beds, people are either held outside in ambulances or on corridors outside wards. We would invest £1.5 billion to provide 6,000 more beds across the system. Those would be provided through new staffed hospital beds and investment in safety-net social care beds, proper step-down care packages and more support for carers and hospices, so that thousands more patients can leave hospital. To solve corridor care, we have to fix the front door and the back door, and invest in primary care as well as social care. That would include boosting recruitment and retention to provide 8,000 more GPs to reduce pressure on hospitals and save the NHS time and money in the first place. We would also place a duty on the Secretary of State to prevent 12-hour waits in A&E and ensure that they do not continue to happen year in, year out. The Liberal Democrats have a plan to bring back the dignity and safety that patients deserve, and the working conditions that NHS staff deserve too. I hope that the Government will listen to our plan, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.”
