Summer Health and Resilience

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I welcome the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), to their places—I have to say that I was not expecting to be the continuity figure in the health portfolio.

We need to be honest: the NHS is now in permacrisis, as outlined by the National Audit Office report. The hallmarks of peak winter pressure in the past—overcrowded A&Es, queuing ambulances and soaring 999 calls—are now a feature year round. This summer was particularly difficult due to record temperatures across the UK, with over 33 NHS trusts reporting temperatures well above the 28° limit set by NHS England, and we can all agree that is not acceptable. It is inhumane not just for patients but for staff—42° is unbearable. A constituent of mine suffered in his final days in a desperately hot setting in Royal Shrewsbury hospital until managers worked with my team to ensure that he was made more comfortable. We do not want to be dealing with cases like that every year. We need hospitals that can withstand the heat, and the Lib Dems have been calling for a new NHS rapid adaptation unit to urgently heatproof the most heat-affected hospitals and care homes.

Turning to corridor care, the percentage of people waiting 12 hours or more in A&E has tripled since before the covid-19 pandemic. Analysis suggests that people waiting this long are twice as likely to die within 30 days of leaving A&E, compared with those who wait just two hours. It is abundantly clear that policies to deal with A&E are not working. Spend is increasing, as outlined in the report, while outcomes are decreasing. We are pumping money into emergency departments with no proportionate improvement.

The Lib Dems have outlined our plan to end 12-hour waits in a year by investing more in step-down care and support for people to leave hospital and go into social care. The Health Bill will reduce co-operation between local authorities and integrated care boards, risking those improvements in social care. Although we welcome the cross-party talks on social care, I hope that the Secretary of State will look at this issue as the Health Bill makes its way through the Lords. Will she listen to our plans, change her approach and commit to ending the ongoing A&E scandal?

[Yvette Cooper]

I thank the hon. Member for her questions, and for drawing on her expertise and interest in this area. On capital funding, that is exactly why we are allocating £32 million as part of the capital fund that we have set out specifically to deal with repairs and safety issues that have become acute across the NHS estate as a result of more than a decade of capital underfunding of the NHS. Ara Darzi made it clear in his report that this has had a huge impact on patients and staff, but also on the NHS’s productivity, because we have facilities that cannot be used because of that capital underfunding.

That £32 million will be targeted at measures to improve cooling systems, but I have asked the NHS to look further, as part of the second wave of funding, at other areas across the country where there will be particular needs as a result of buildings needing to deal with extreme heat, which they were never designed for. As a result of the announcements I have made today, £1.5 billion is now going into improvements to existing facilities, to upgrade them and ensure that they reach the right quality and standards.

On the hon. Member’s point about corridor care, nobody should have to be seen or treated in a corridor, or have to wait for a long time at one of the most distressing times of all, when they need emergency care and support. I have seen some phenomenal examples and have discussed the work that hospitals such as Watford have done to eliminate their corridor care challenges. We have introduced reporting and publication of those statistics for the first time, exactly to ensure that we have that priority. But I pay tribute to the work done by A&E teams to improve performance, despite the huge increase in demand that they saw in July—they are doing a really important job.