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The Liberal Democrats have set out a £1.5bn plan to give patients in England a legal right to be seen in A&E within 12 hours, to end what they have called a “deadly corridor crisis”.
In a speech, party leader Sir Ed Davey called for a new legal duty to limit the time patients wait to be admitted, transferred or discharged after arriving in A&E.
The Lib Dems say their plan would be funded by scrapping a UK-US pharmaceuticals deal, which could see the NHS pay billions more for drugs.
The Department of Health and Social Care said the government had invested an extra £26bn in the NHS and argued it would “take time to turn around the mess we inherited”.
The number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for admission to A&E has increased substantially since the pandemic in 2021.
The latest NHS figures from November show 50,648 people in England waited more than 12 hours following a decision to admit them to hospital.
There were an estimated 16,644 excess deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England in 2024, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
Sir Ed said: “This deadly corridor crisis isn’t befitting of the heroic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who work in our NHS.
“It’s not what we expect from our NHS, and it’s not what we pay our hard-earned money in taxes to fund our NHS for.”
The Lib Dems say they will raise £1.5bn from cancelling the planned medicines deal the UK government agreed with President Donald Trump’s US administration last year.
The agreement keeps American imports of UK medicines tariff-free for three years in return for the NHS raising its threshold for spending on new treatments by 25%.
In December, the Financial Times reported the Department of Health and Social Care estimates the deal will see medicines spending rise by £1.5bn over the next three years.
The Lib Dems say the clawed-back £1.5bn would make around 6,000 more beds available each day by expanding hospital capacity and creating social care beds for patients waiting on long-term care decisions.
Under the party’s plans, more places would be reserved in care homes and funding would be made available for people leaving hospital and carers looking after family members at home.
Under the proposals, ministers would have a statutory duty to ensure patients wait no longer than 12 hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged after arriving in A&E.
Sir Ed said the party’s package of proposals “could put an end to 12-hour A&E waits altogether, by the end of the year”.
“Never again should anyone have to watch their loved one die on a trolley in a hospital corridor,” he added
Asked by the BBC if the plans were ambitious enough, Sir Ed said his party would go further to end long waits in A&E if it was in government.
“We need to get back to four hour waits and less,” Sir Ed said.
“We’re the only party talking about it. We want to raise it and show it can be tackled in a year.”
Getting the NHS “back on its feet” after the pandemic, which increased pressures on the health service, is one of the Labour government’s biggest priorities.
In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour said its immediate priority on health will be to “get a grip on the record waiting lists” and “return to meeting NHS performance standards”.
Labour’s main focus has been getting waiting times down for non-urgent, consultant-led treatments.
NHS waiting lists for those treatments remain high, with around 7.4 million people waiting as of late 2025, significantly above pre-pandemic levels, though slightly down from peak backlogs after Covid-19.
On A&E treatment, last year the government said it would invest more than £450m on expanding urgent and emergency care facilities to provide faster care for patients.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said even in the NHS’s best days “there will still have been patients on trolleys in corridors being treated in conditions that fall short of my ambitions and expectations for our health service”.
He said during his tenure as health secretary so far, he had “sought to get the balance right – being proud of our progress without overselling the success and being honest about our shortcomings and challenges without fuelling pessimism and defeatism”.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said “corridor care is unacceptable”.
“That’s why this government is tackling the situation by delivering 500,000 more vaccinations compared to last year, building new same day emergency centres, mental health crisis centres, and deploying 500 brand new ambulances,” the spokesperson said.
“In addition, we’ve struck a deal on medicine pricing that puts patients first and strengthens our life sciences sector, all without taking essential funding from our frontline services.”
The Conservatives, who were in government during the pandemic, have been approached for comment.
