Tory candidate says NHS patients should be made to wait longer at A&E to discourage visits

Patients should be made to wait longer at A&E to discourage them from making future visits, a Conservative candidate has argued.

Philip Lee, who is seeking re-election in next week’s general election, said the four hour blanket target for seeing A&E patients was unhelpful and that some patients should be made to wait longer.

“There have been difficult ­decisions made on funding because we have inherited a target culture of saying we’ve to meet four hour targets in A&E,” Mr Lee told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme.

“Personally, I think there are a number of people in A&E who should be waiting more than four hours, okay? Because it was a weapon in the past to try to stop people misusing the service.”

In April this year A&E waiting time targets in England hit their worst levels in a decade, according to official figures.

Hospitals are supposed to see 95% of patients within four hours but are now at their lowest level of performance since the target was introduced by the last Labour government in 2004.

At the time the figures were revealed Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme that a Conservative government would give the NHS “whatever they need” to do their job properly.

Labour says it has a five-point plant to deal with the A&E crisis, including widening access to GPs, improving telephone consultation by staffing lines with nurses, keeping walk-in centres open, and improving social care provision.