Corridor care should be the Government's wake up call

Our community knows the reality of corridor care all too well from St Helier Hospital. As of May 2026, St Helier had the 14th highest level of corridor care in the country, and the 5th highest in London. On average, 51 patients a day were waiting in corridors or receiving care in corridors. 

But as we all know, behind every one of those numbers is someone in pain and often in undignified circumstances when they are at their most vulnerable. 

One constituent told me about their mother-in-law being taken into St Helier and left in a corridor crying out for help to go to the toilet. She struggled to get out of the trolley, was left naked from the waist down, and experienced something that was utterly distressing. 

Another constituent described an elderly neighbour left on a trolley for 48 hours and forced to use incontinence pads. They were particularly worried about what happens to patients who have no family or friends there to speak up for them. 

That is the reality of corridor care, and it is a resilience problem. 

I welcome the £57 million granted this year, after months of campaigning to upgrade emergency services at St Helier. But the truth is that the Government should have acted sooner. It had to be fought for tirelessly, and it came only once conditions had become dire. 

That is exactly the problem with reactive government. They wait until conditions become intolerable, and then pay more to fix a crisis than they would ever have paid to prevent one. 

For too long, the Treasury has treated long-term capital planning as a cost to be contained, rather than an investment that produces vital returns: safer hospitals, better patient flow, lower crisis spending, and greater resilience when shocks come. 

Every winter for the past 13 years, this country has watched the same NHS crisis unfold: missed targets and hospitals under pressure. If something happens every year, it is not an unexpected emergency. It is a predictable failure to plan. 

We should have learned this lesson during Covid. Delaying action did not avoid cost. It made later measures harsher, wasted more money, and cost more lives. The same logic applies here. Delaying investment in capacity, buildings, patient flow and emergency infrastructure does not save money. It simply stores up greater human and financial cost for the future. 

We need a new culture of resilience. Not every unused bed is a waste. Not every investment is extravagance. The real irresponsibility is repeatedly paying more for crises. 

Corridor care should be treated as a warning sign: of hospitals under pressure, yes, but also of a state that plans too late, invests too little, and pays too much for failure.