NHS Corridor Care

Iqbal Mohamed Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I am so sorry to hear of the situation in her community in Scotland. It is regrettable, and patients and their families deserve better. Absolutely, if we cannot accurately assess the issue in full, it is impossible to deal with, and I hope the Minister will talk today about how she will commit to revising this definition to make it more robust.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate and for allowing me to intervene. The Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS trust published data about patients in corridors for the first time only in May, and in that month it recorded 121 patients per day being treated outside clinical rooms and areas. A constituent of mine, Catherine, wrote to me to describe seeing at first hand elderly people waiting in corridors for hours with no family members to support them. Does the hon. Member agree that corridor care has moved from being an exceptional problem to an everyday issue in many NHS trusts, and that the Government must act to address the root cause of this issue?

[Dr Allin-Khan]

The hon. Member is right, but I know that the Government care deeply about this. This is not something on which I am in tension with the Government in any way. I have spoken to the Ministers and the Secretary of State, and I know that they are committed to acting and ensuring that every single patient across our country gets the best possible care. Let us be really clear: the NHS should not be a political football. Safe and dignified healthcare should not be a political football. I hope that we are all in agreement on this issue today. I would have hoped to see more Members on the Opposition Benches today, and I hope that their absence is not a reflection of how much they care about the issue, because, quite frankly, we owe it to all our communities to get this right.

I know from my own experience, as will other hon. Friends in the Chamber, that when someone comes to A&E, it is often the worst day of their life. It could be the worst day of their life because of their experience as a patient, or it could be the worst day of their life because someone they love—their child, their partner, their mother or their father—is dying or has died. When we think about the dignity and care that we give, we have to look at it holistically—not simply as a set of symptoms that we are treating but as a family and the experience that they take away with them of what has happened on that day. People are in tears, people are in pain, and we owe it to them to get this right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) on securing this debate. Some very important points have been made. I am going to skip through some of those important points to reinforce the message, and bring forward issues raised directly with me by my constituents.

What we have heard is that what was once regarded as an exceptional state of affairs in the NHS has become so commonplace that Parliament is now debating it as a national issue in its own right. We have heard about the lack of investment and the redirection of resources, and about the issue being compounded over the many years of the previous Government. I acknowledge and recognise the efforts made by the current Government to try to address this, as well as many other challenges in the NHS. I congratulate them on their efforts to bring down waiting lists by many, many thousands; my constituents appreciate that.

We heard that more and more that patients are being treated away from clinical and sterile places: in corridors, cupboards and other places not designed for treatment. They are being denied their privacy, dignity and adequate support. One doctor described patients dying because they could not access appropriate clinical areas in time. That is not what we would class as a jewel-in-the-crown public service—but that is what the NHS is, and all of us across the House want to restore it back to being the world-class, free-at-the-point-of-need care service for every single person in our country.

For many years, hospitals under pressure often managed overcrowding by keeping patients and ambulances outside emergency departments while they waited to be handed over and moved into clinical areas. That resulted in ambulance waiting times going through the roof and many patients not receiving the emergency paramedic assistance they clearly required. Under the previous Government, that issue was displaced: from holding patients inside ambulances to moving them into the hospital building, freeing up ambulances to go and serve other patients.

I am not a medical doctor, but I am a scientist and an engineer, and what is obvious is that the 40 hospitals under the previous Government did not get delivered—not all of them were new, but that is also true of the ones that were to be refurbished and expanded. As with prison spaces, we lack the number of beds in our country that the NHS needs to provide safe and dignified care for every patient who seeks treatment.

Catherine, one of my constituents, wrote to me to say that she went into hospital with her husband. She waited in a corridor for five hours, but she saw many elderly patients with no relatives or friends with them, who had been waiting there for many hours before she arrived, and nobody was able to look after them or offer them water. They had to keep asking for water from other patients. That experience will exacerbate somebody’s medical condition and increase demand on the NHS. We have heard—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I call Sarah Hall.