The winter crisis gripping our National Health Service is the worst we’ve faced in decades. Waiting list numbers are in their millions, patients are routinely treated in hospital corridors and A&E departments are close to collapse.

Critically ill people wait for hours for ambulances. Hospital beds are scarce.

Care for the elderly and vulnerable is woefully under-resourced, with people feeling effectively abandoned, while NHS workloads are out of control.

In short, the NHS faces a humanitarian crisis.

Covid worsened pressure on the NHS, but waiting lists stood at 4.6 million before the pandemic hit. Yet Rishi Sunak routinely dismisses the crisis as nothing to do with his government, despite 13 years of the Tory maladministration.

North-east London has London’s highest rate of NHS vacancies. We cannot go on without investment in staff and in services, having lost large numbers of international staff since Brexit.

Britain desperately needs an emergency plan to make the NHS sustainable through the winter and beyond.

This government’s sticking plaster approach is inadequate and is costing lives.

Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has rightly talked about a 10-year plan for the health service.

A Labour Government will train a generation of doctors, nurses, and midwives. People will again be treated on time and not made to wait months for lifesaving, life-enabling treatment

Labour will fund this by closing tax loopholes of the super-rich.

We will fund hospital care, cut waiting times, ease the pressure on A&E departments and pay staff a decent wage.

Before Labour’s 1997 election victory, the NHS was in utter disrepair, with hospital care cut to the bone, soaring waiting lists and grotesquely under-resourced staffing.

Britain’s NHS was on life support then and is again now. The Labour Government elected then rescued and sustained the NHS, throughout its time in office.

Under Labour, operation waiting times and treatment targets in accident and emergency departments improved significantly and dramatically, as did care for the elderly and vulnerable.

Now is the time to end this humanitarian crisis in the NHS and take our health service off life support. The next Labour government will do just that.