Lisa Smart

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to be here for business questions once again, subbing for my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean). Last week the NHS published the first ever official figures on corridor care, which ripped off the plaster and revealed a scandal that many of us have seen at first hand. In one month, patients across the country were treated in corridors at least 69,000 times, and that is with major trusts such as Birmingham failing to share their figures. The practice has become dangerously normalised across our NHS. We on the Lib Dem Benches believe that amounts to serious and continual negligence, and Ministers should be held to account before a corridor care tribunal of patients, bereaved families and frontline NHS staff. Behind every one of those numbers is an NHS trust or a hospital starved of resources and capital funds, and a social care system in crisis that leaves hospitals full of people who cannot leave, despite being desperate to do so, because the care package they need is not available. Meanwhile, A&E waiting rooms are heaving with patients waiting to be seen. Nowhere is the crumbling estate behind this crisis clearer than at Stepping Hill hospital in my patch, with its growing £134 million repair backlog. There have been collapsing ceilings, leaking roofs that forced the temporary closure of the intensive care unit, and times when just four of the 14 lifts were working, meaning that anyone using a wheelchair was unable to visit a higher-floor ward and that patients were carried up and down stairs in scoops. Will the Government therefore make time for an urgent debate on the corridor care crisis and the state of the NHS estate to ensure that patients, including those in my Hazel Grove constituency, are no longer treated in corridors, or left waiting in them for hours for the treatment they deserve?