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This is gut-wrenching.
In June and July 2025, more than 74,000 patients in England waited 12 hours or more on trolleys in hospital corridors after a decision to admit.
Go back 10 years, and the same period saw just 47 such waits.
What was once unthinkable has become routine, and it tells us something critical: the NHS is not suffering a temporary crisis but a structural breakdown.
The corridors are not the disease; they are the symptom.1
This matters now more than ever.
Labour has been in government for a year, elected on promises to rebuild the health service.
But the public do not measure governments on intentions – they judge on lived reality.
When we see loved ones stranded in corridors, political trust collapses.
For Labour, this is existential: health remains the single most important issue for voters, and corridor care is the most visible sign of failure.
A decade ago, the operative phrase was “winter crisis”: every January, emergency departments buckled under flu, cold snaps and overstretched wards.
Now, the summer provides no respite. Accident & Emergency attendances in June and July 2025 reached 2.9 million, a 15 per cent rise since 2015, and the highest ever recorded for those months.
Even at the height of summer, 7.2 per cent of patients attending A&E waited 12 hours or more after the decision was made to admit them.
In trusts such as Epsom and St Helier, and Warrington and Halton, almost half of all trolley waits exceeded 12 hours.
The corridors are no longer an exception: they are the new baseline.12
The reasons are not mysterious; they are the direct result of political decisions taken over the past 15 years.
Hospital capacity has been squeezed while demand has risen.
General and acute bed numbers have fallen for decades – from around 181,000 in the late 1980s to just over 101,000 today.
England now has one of the lowest numbers of beds per 1,000 people in the developed world.
High occupancy means the system runs permanently “hot,” with no spare capacity when demand spikes.3
The workforce has been left stretched to breaking point.
Vacancies for nurses remain stubbornly high, even as reliance on costly agency staff drains billions from NHS budgets.
Training pipelines were neglected for years, and retention has collapsed under the weight of pay erosion, long shifts and unmanageable patient loads.
Recruitment from abroad plugs gaps but raises ethical questions, with the World Health Organisation warning of looming global shortages by 2030.4
Social care, meanwhile, has been gutted.
Cuts to local authority budgets after 2010 forced councils to ration support, meaning hundreds of thousands of people who once would have received funded packages now go without.
Hospitals cannot discharge patients who are medically fit but have nowhere safe to go.
The result is “bed-blocking,” where thousands of hospital beds are occupied not by acutely ill patients but by people stranded in limbo.
Social care was supposed to be the pressure valve; instead it has become the bottleneck.5
The infrastructure is crumbling too.
Years of underinvestment, compounded by the legacy of Private Finance Initiative contracts, have left many hospitals with unsafe estates and limited room to expand.
The promise of “40 new hospitals” under the Conservatives never materialised, and capital budgets remain far below what independent experts say is required.6
This is not just about statistics.
Consider Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, where in June and July 2025 nearly half of trolley waits breached the 12-hour mark.
Or Warrington and Halton Hospitals, where the figure has been similarly dire.
These trusts are not anomalies; they are bellwethers for a national collapse in standards.
They show what happens when ageing estates, overstretched staff and jammed discharge pathways collide.
Corridor care there is not an accident of local mismanagement – it is the natural consequence of a system run past its safe limits.1
So what would it take to turn this around?
First, honesty about the scale.
There is no quick fix.
To end corridor care, the NHS needs more beds, more staff, and functioning social care.
That requires billions in investment, not just clever reorganisations.
The cost per acute hospital bed day is around £345. To add 10,000 staffed beds—a modest restoration compared with the tens of thousands lost—would cost at least £1.25 billion a year in running costs, before capital expenditure to build or upgrade the wards.7
Second, the workforce must be rebuilt.
That means improved pay and conditions to keep experienced staff, funded expansion of training places, and a long-term commitment to retention.
Retention schemes cost money—the Royal College of Nursing’s proposals for fairer pay run into the low billions annually—but reliance on agency staff already costs more.
In other words, investing in permanent staff is not extravagance; it is fiscal common sense.8
Third, social care has to be rescued.
That means stabilising provider finances, mandating fair pay for carers, and expanding domiciliary and short-term care so hospitals can discharge patients safely. This too costs billions – but the alternative is corridor care forever.
Labour has floated the creation of a National Care Service but has been cautious about pace. A phased nationalisation would bring care back under public control, align incentives with the NHS, and end the absurd fragmentation of the current market. The upfront costs would be high, it would be legally and fiscally complex—but the alternative is a social care system that continues to fail, and hospitals that continue to jam.9
International examples show alternatives are possible.
Nordic countries have integrated health and social care far more successfully, though they also fund their systems using a higher proportion of their national resources.
New Zealand attempted a rapid centralisation in 2022, creating a single national health agency. Its experience shows the pitfalls of poorly executed reform—but also the gains of equity and joined-up governance when done properly.10
Politically, the stakes could not be higher.
Corridor care is not an abstract policy failure; it is a visceral symbol of decline.
Every patient stranded on a trolley is a rebuke to ministerial promises.
If Labour fails to deliver visible improvements, it risks ceding the narrative to its opponents and losing the fragile trust that brought it to power.
Conversely, if the government grasps the nettle, invests seriously, and explains the costs honestly, it could reshape the NHS for a generation and restore faith that public services can work.
Either the UK accepts corridor care as the new normal, letting the founding promise of the NHS collapse into managed decline, or it invests, reforms and rebuilds—admitting the price, but also the payoff.
There is no middle ground.
Corridor care is already here.
The question is whether we let it stay here.
Share this post:
Corridor care is normal now in the NHS — and it’s a symptom, not the disease
Share this post:
This is gut-wrenching.
In June and July 2025, more than 74,000 patients in England waited 12 hours or more on trolleys in hospital corridors after a decision to admit.
Go back 10 years, and the same period saw just 47 such waits.
What was once unthinkable has become routine, and it tells us something critical: the NHS is not suffering a temporary crisis but a structural breakdown.
The corridors are not the disease; they are the symptom.1
This matters now more than ever.
Labour has been in government for a year, elected on promises to rebuild the health service.
But the public do not measure governments on intentions – they judge on lived reality.
When we see loved ones stranded in corridors, political trust collapses.
For Labour, this is existential: health remains the single most important issue for voters, and corridor care is the most visible sign of failure.
A decade ago, the operative phrase was “winter crisis”: every January, emergency departments buckled under flu, cold snaps and overstretched wards.
Now, the summer provides no respite. Accident & Emergency attendances in June and July 2025 reached 2.9 million, a 15 per cent rise since 2015, and the highest ever recorded for those months.
Even at the height of summer, 7.2 per cent of patients attending A&E waited 12 hours or more after the decision was made to admit them.
In trusts such as Epsom and St Helier, and Warrington and Halton, almost half of all trolley waits exceeded 12 hours.
The corridors are no longer an exception: they are the new baseline.12
The reasons are not mysterious; they are the direct result of political decisions taken over the past 15 years.
Hospital capacity has been squeezed while demand has risen.
General and acute bed numbers have fallen for decades – from around 181,000 in the late 1980s to just over 101,000 today.
England now has one of the lowest numbers of beds per 1,000 people in the developed world.
High occupancy means the system runs permanently “hot,” with no spare capacity when demand spikes.3
The workforce has been left stretched to breaking point.
Vacancies for nurses remain stubbornly high, even as reliance on costly agency staff drains billions from NHS budgets.
Training pipelines were neglected for years, and retention has collapsed under the weight of pay erosion, long shifts and unmanageable patient loads.
Recruitment from abroad plugs gaps but raises ethical questions, with the World Health Organisation warning of looming global shortages by 2030.4
Social care, meanwhile, has been gutted.
Cuts to local authority budgets after 2010 forced councils to ration support, meaning hundreds of thousands of people who once would have received funded packages now go without.
Hospitals cannot discharge patients who are medically fit but have nowhere safe to go.
The result is “bed-blocking,” where thousands of hospital beds are occupied not by acutely ill patients but by people stranded in limbo.
Social care was supposed to be the pressure valve; instead it has become the bottleneck.5
The infrastructure is crumbling too.
Years of underinvestment, compounded by the legacy of Private Finance Initiative contracts, have left many hospitals with unsafe estates and limited room to expand.
The promise of “40 new hospitals” under the Conservatives never materialised, and capital budgets remain far below what independent experts say is required.6
This is not just about statistics.
Consider Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, where in June and July 2025 nearly half of trolley waits breached the 12-hour mark.
Or Warrington and Halton Hospitals, where the figure has been similarly dire.
These trusts are not anomalies; they are bellwethers for a national collapse in standards.
They show what happens when ageing estates, overstretched staff and jammed discharge pathways collide.
Corridor care there is not an accident of local mismanagement – it is the natural consequence of a system run past its safe limits.1
So what would it take to turn this around?
First, honesty about the scale.
There is no quick fix.
To end corridor care, the NHS needs more beds, more staff, and functioning social care.
That requires billions in investment, not just clever reorganisations.
The cost per acute hospital bed day is around £345. To add 10,000 staffed beds—a modest restoration compared with the tens of thousands lost—would cost at least £1.25 billion a year in running costs, before capital expenditure to build or upgrade the wards.7
Second, the workforce must be rebuilt.
That means improved pay and conditions to keep experienced staff, funded expansion of training places, and a long-term commitment to retention.
Retention schemes cost money—the Royal College of Nursing’s proposals for fairer pay run into the low billions annually—but reliance on agency staff already costs more.
In other words, investing in permanent staff is not extravagance; it is fiscal common sense.8
Third, social care has to be rescued.
That means stabilising provider finances, mandating fair pay for carers, and expanding domiciliary and short-term care so hospitals can discharge patients safely. This too costs billions – but the alternative is corridor care forever.
Labour has floated the creation of a National Care Service but has been cautious about pace. A phased nationalisation would bring care back under public control, align incentives with the NHS, and end the absurd fragmentation of the current market. The upfront costs would be high, it would be legally and fiscally complex—but the alternative is a social care system that continues to fail, and hospitals that continue to jam.9
International examples show alternatives are possible.
Nordic countries have integrated health and social care far more successfully, though they also fund their systems using a higher proportion of their national resources.
New Zealand attempted a rapid centralisation in 2022, creating a single national health agency. Its experience shows the pitfalls of poorly executed reform—but also the gains of equity and joined-up governance when done properly.10
Politically, the stakes could not be higher.
Corridor care is not an abstract policy failure; it is a visceral symbol of decline.
Every patient stranded on a trolley is a rebuke to ministerial promises.
If Labour fails to deliver visible improvements, it risks ceding the narrative to its opponents and losing the fragile trust that brought it to power.
Conversely, if the government grasps the nettle, invests seriously, and explains the costs honestly, it could reshape the NHS for a generation and restore faith that public services can work.
Either the UK accepts corridor care as the new normal, letting the founding promise of the NHS collapse into managed decline, or it invests, reforms and rebuilds—admitting the price, but also the payoff.
There is no middle ground.
Corridor care is already here.
The question is whether we let it stay here.
Footnotes
Anna Bawden, “NHS corridor care now year-round crisis in England, experts say,” The Guardian, 1 September 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/01/nhs-corridor-care-now-year-round-crisis-in-england-experts-say ↩ ↩2 ↩3
NHS England, “Statistical commentary—June and July 2025 A&E activity,” NHS England. https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Statistical-commentary-July-2025-5fg32.pdf ↩
The King’s Fund, “NHS hospital bed numbers: past, present, future.” https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads/nhs-hospital-bed-numbers ↩
NHS Digital, “NHS vacancies and workforce statistics,” NHS Digital. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey/april-2015—march-2025-experimental-statistics
WHO, “Global health workforce shortage projections,” World Health Organisation. https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce ↩
Skills for Care, “The size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England,” Skills for Care. https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Adult-Social-Care-Workforce-Data/Workforce-intelligence/documents/Size-and-structure/The-size-and-structure-of-the-adult-social-care-sector-and-workforce-in-England-2025.pdf
UK Parliament Library Briefing, “Adult social care funding,” 2023. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmhealth/368/report.html ↩
National Audit Office, “PFI in the NHS: costs and consequences.” https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PFI-and-PF2.pdf
NHS capital budget reports (various). https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/unhealthy-end-looms-private-finance-initiative ↩
NHS Reference Costs 2020/21, average unit cost of an acute bed-day. https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/articles/nhs-reference-costs (or equivalent reference cost documentation) ↩
Royal College of Nursing/London Economics, “The real cost of agency staffing,” 2022. https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/news/uk-32bn-agency-spend-could-have-paid-salaries-of-31000-nurses-051223 ↩
Labour Party, “A New Deal for Care” (policy outline, 2024); UK Parliament debate on National Care Service (2025). https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2025/05/02/casey-commission-tasked-with-producing-plan-for-national-care-service-by-2026
https://fullfact.org/government-tracker/national-care-service-nhs ↩
OECD Health Statistics 2024, “Hospital beds and occupancy.” https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-glance-2023_e04f8239/full-report/hospital-beds-and-occupancy_10add5df.html
New Zealand Ministry of Health, “Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act implementation review,” 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10843487 ↩
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