Stepping Hill Hospital

Tom Morrison Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)]

Stepping Hill hospital sits in my constituency. It is one of the busiest hospitals in the region, with over 91,000 patient admissions each year. It serves Stockport, parts of Greater Manchester and parts of Derbyshire. I have raised the issues faced by the staff and patients there many times in the House and been told repeatedly that the Government are working with Stockport NHS foundation trust and the integrated care board to solve them, but time and again we are let down by the lack of real action.

On Friday I visited the hospital with my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart), and we met senior teams, clinicians, nurses and operational staff.

[Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

On the point about nurses at Stepping Hill hospital, as the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) knows, my mother did her nurse training at Stepping Hill back in the 1970s. Since it is my mother’s birthday tomorrow, will the hon. Gentleman join me in wishing my mum a very happy birthday and acknowledging the hard work and commitment of the nurses at Stepping Hill hospital?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Mr Jogee, I am sure we would all like to wish your mother a happy birthday, but we are discussing the future of Stepping Hill hospital.

[Mr Morrison]

I absolutely respect that intervention, and I do wish the hon. Gentleman’s mother a happy birthday. If it were possible, we would all do a rendition of “Happy Birthday”, but we will leave that for another time.

This was not my first visit to the hospital—I have been there several times, both as an elected representative and as a patient—but it was the angriest and most emotional I have ever been while visiting it. On our visit, I saw staff and patients’ dignity taken away from them, I saw a building completely and utterly unfit for purpose, and I saw a health system that was left to rot, quite literally, over the years of Conservative neglect now being given only plasters by the current Government.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the visit was harrowing. To see staff and patients suffer in buildings that leaked, surrounded by walls that were rotting and floors that were sinking, was truly awful. It painted a stark and terrible picture of the way our health service is being treated by decision makers in Whitehall, with £120 million being spent each year just on mitigating the damage being caused by the hospital’s crumbling estate. This is an incredibly expensive sticking plaster that does not solve the underlying problems, but instead makes things worse. A comprehensive repair of Stepping Hill’s estate would cost just over £134 million, and the Government must commit to providing that amount to get the hospital back on its feet. It would save money in the long term and mitigate the huge risks the estate poses.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: what we saw on our visit was harrowing. He talks about value for money and how over £100 million is going on just maintaining the buildings as they currently stand. That is literally plugging holes in the wall. I am sure he agrees that a better use of the money would be to spend capital on building a new additional site in Stockport town centre. That would free up space on the site that is no longer fit for purpose and would be a much more sensible, value-for-money way to spend the money.

[Mr Morrison]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing that idea forward. Yes, absolutely; I will talk later about how a new site in Stockport could alleviate the stress on Stepping Hill and save the Government a lot of money.

Stockport NHS foundation trust is clear that the £134 million would be over and above any Government funding already allocated. The trust simply cannot make the efficiency savings being asked of it when it is firefighting each day. I want to tell the House what this looks like and how this firefighting impacts the day-to-day lives of the staff and the patients they look after.

On our visit, nurses told me of the huge issues they face regarding infection control. There are genuine concerns that the outdated and inefficient building makes infection control even harder. Beds are too close to each other and people are unable to move around within a safe distance of each other. Parts of the site predate the NHS and, as such, the corridors are so small that two wheelchairs or trolleys cannot go past each other. Shockingly, the hospital has only around 20% of the side rooms it needs to isolate infectious patients, and in the electrocardiography zone there are no handwashing facilities. The nurses told me that during covid, they had to create massive one-way systems through the wards, making care and movement even more complex. That was a logistical challenge at a time when the NHS was already being tested to breaking point.

The building itself is also dangerous. On the visit, I was shown the relentless water damage and leaks across the estate. When it rains, staff race around the hospital putting out buckets to catch the water dripping through the ceiling, sometimes on to vital equipment.

Ward and shower rooms have become completely unusable because of leaks, which have further reduced capacity. I have seen wards where sewage comes up through the drains, meaning that nurses have to clean up rather than look after the patients they should be tending to. The glass windows in the cardiology unit are at a huge risk of falling out, posing a serious safety risk.

Clay pipework from 1905 is still in use and leaking, meaning that escaping steam is rotting the floors beneath. Some floors are now physically sinking. As I entered the building, I saw that the hospital’s café was closed for that very reason—I could actually see where the floor was beginning to slope down. Scaffolding is literally holding up the glass ceiling in the main entrance— a worrying welcome for patients entering the building.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Morrison]

Many of the hospital’s wards are Nightingale wards, which cannot support contemporary care. As I have already mentioned, these wards do not have enough side rooms. That poses a massive risk in terms of infection control, but it also poses challenges when providing patients with the privacy and dignity they need. When patients are receiving end-of-life care, the hospital cannot always provide a separate room, and instead beds are curtained off to give families the privacy they need. To ensure that people are aware, staff place a candle on the ward entrance to tell others that someone is having their last moments with their friends and family. That was the hardest thing to see on our visit. It makes me so angry and ashamed that families in my constituency are saying goodbye to their loved ones in this way.

It is not just the physical infrastructure that needs addressing. Some staff talked me through how outdated computer software and internet connections mean that they have to use memory sticks to take images from one computer to another. Some of the images are for time-critical operations, in which every second counts, yet clinicians, doctors and nurses had no option but to walk memory sticks from one computer to another, wasting precious time.

Finally, let me talk about the conditions the staff work in. The ward designs in the older buildings make staffing a serious challenge. Staff-to-patient ratios mean that nurses must look after no more than eight patients, but some wards have 14 beds, meaning that two nurses are required, despite one of those nurses being underutilised. The staff rooms are also completely inadequate; I saw one room that could fit only two people comfortably, despite there being 12 people on that ward, while the staff room on the cardiology unit, which serves 30 people, has only one toilet.

[Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, on securing this debate on an important issue for the three MPs who represent the local authority of Stockport. I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests regarding my trade union membership and being chair of the all-party parliamentary group on cancer.

All of us in this House would agree that our constituents deserve high-quality, first-class, reliable care in hospitals and from our GPs, and that the staff also deserve high-quality services. I am not sure that I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion for a new location for a new hospital—I think there should be a wider discussion, but I do not wish to take up too much time in dissecting the Stockport local plan. However, I do agree that Stepping Hill hospital is simply not adequate for patients or staff. Does he agree that in the past two years this Government have allocated £2.5 million for targeted safety works, £26 million for the construction of a new pathology building and £75 million for the Stockport NHS foundation trust over the next four years? That is a stark contrast with the previous 14 years—the coalition Government, of which his party was part, and the Conservative Government that followed.

[Mr Morrison]

I respect the hon. Gentleman a lot; we all work well together as Stockport MPs. Although we should never say no to money coming into the hospital, even the NHS trust is saying that this money does not touch the sides, as I have said. We need more investment, and the £134 million repair bill needs to be sorted. We can discuss the need for a different site another time; I am fully behind Stockport needing a new hospital site.

I was talking about the staff room for the cardiology unit, which serves 30 people but has only one toilet. That is not to mention the fact that the toilet windows are not frosted over, so there is a massive privacy issue for the staff. I was also told about one member of staff who works in reception in one unit and who uses an electric wheelchair. Horrifyingly, their work environment is completely inadequate, not only because the doors to the unit are not suitable for wheelchairs to go through, but because they cannot access an accessible toilet and so are forced to leave the building in which they work to go to another a few minutes away. Often they have to go out in the rain just to use a facility that they should have the right to use. That is simply a disgrace, and I cannot believe it is happening in 2026.

I asked why that person still felt the need to work there even with such basic accessibility requirements not being met. I was told that it was because they cared so much about the hospital, about Stepping Hill and about the job they do that they would not leave. That was a running theme through our visit. Despite all the issues and problems I have laid out, the staff across Stepping Hill maintain excellent standards in conditions that are working against them. They continue to provide an unbelievably caring and wonderful service. They are a credit to the NHS and to Stockport. They never complain or down tools because of the conditions; instead, they get on with the job.

My partner Lou and I sadly needed to spend time at Stepping Hill recently. Despite the awful reasons we were there, we felt protected, supported and cared for. I want to take this moment to say thank you to the staff for everything they did for us, for keeping us safe and for looking out for us. I promise here that I will always have their back and will never stop campaigning to get them the hospital they deserve.

So what is the solution? The Government announce bits of support every now and then, and they often announce the same pots of money time and again in the hope that it looks like support is there, but that does not help. We need a fully funded strategy for how Stepping Hill will be saved. There were plans for a new hospital in Stockport that were originally rejected by the previous Conservative Government. The plans would have enabled some relief for Stepping Hill and helped free up much-needed space on the estate. The plans also had backing from the trust and the council, which partnered to develop them, and the integrated care board. They pushed as much as they could. Sadly, it does not appear that the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) supported them, but we will talk about that another time.

Whatever the solution, the fact is that action is now desperately needed. We cannot go on with more debates, more questions to Ministers and the Prime Minister, more letters to the Department of Health and Social Care and more meetings with officials—the Government have to act now. For over a decade the Conservative Government left Stepping Hill hospital to rot. This Government cannot do the same, and the Minister should not allow that to happen.

I want to end with a number of questions for the Minister. First, it is clear what help is needed and required, so why have the Government failed to act so far? Secondly, is it appropriate for 30 NHS staff members to share one toilet and that an NHS worker who uses a wheelchair has to go out in the rain to access the nearest accessible toilet? Thirdly, is it fair that patients at the end of their life cannot share their final moments with friends and family in privacy and with dignity? Finally, will the Minister come to Stepping Hill hospital along with the Prime Minister, who often talks about Stockport and the work he did there, so that they can see at first hand what happens when those in Westminster and Whitehall take our hospitals for granted?