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.