Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies of reports that patients at Pilgrim Hospital outpatients department are being left for extended periods without access to beds due to lack of bed availability; and what steps he is taking to ensure timely access to inpatient care in Lincolnshire.

The Government is clear that patients should expect and receive the highest standard of care and accepts that urgent and emergency care performance has been below the high standards that patients should expect in recent years. Providing care in corridors, and other inappropriate settings, is completely unacceptable.

Our Urgent and Emergency Care Plan, published in June 2025, set out the steps we are taking to ensure at least 78% of patients in A&E departments are seen within four hours, to reduce the number of patients waiting over 12 hours for admission or discharge from an emergency department, and to reduce ambulance handover times to a maximum of 45 minutes.

NHS England has been working with trusts to put in place new reporting arrangements related to the use of temporary escalation spaces, to drive improvement. Subject to a review of data quality, this information will be published shortly, and we will consider how this data could be published on a more regular basis.