Labour leader Ed Miliband: I will sort this A&E mess

The Labour leader criticised A&E waiting times as he arrived in the West Midlands to take questions from a 200-strong audience of members of the public as part of the General Election campaign.

But he refused to be drawn on whether he would go into coalition with the SNP, UKIP, Greens or Liberal Democrats in the event of another hung Parliament.

Today, the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham was outlining a 10-year plan for the NHS should the party return to government in 100 days' time.

Q&A with Ed Miliband:

What are you doing to help lower paid people?

"If you're an employer who wants to pay the living wage, we will offer tax incentives. If every employer raised wages by £1 it saves the government money. Zero hours contracts are exploitative and we will deal with them."

The Tories downgraded Stafford Hospital. What can you do to undo this?

"We will look at the local situation here. Hospital closures should be medically led, not by penny pinching."

We need to know from you if your party will re-instate the services lost at Stafford Hospital. Other hospitals like Stoke and Wolverhampton are full. They cannot take Stafford's patients.

"You will be slightly disappointed. I'm not going to make a false promise.

"We will have to look at the situation we inherit. The easy thing would be to make you a promise.

"We have to sort things out. We can't be in a situation where we have people being treated in tents in hospital car parks.

"So let's hire the new workers, let's deal with the problems of people not being able to see their GP

"My undertaking to you is we will look at it on a medical basis at Stafford and elsewhere."

Will you re-nationalise the power industry?

"We're in difficult times. I can't justify buying out power companies. It would require tens of billions of pounds we need to spend on other things.

"I can justify changing the way (the energy sector) works. We will freeze energy prices until 2017, meaning they can only fall, not rise."

What will you do about people who work but also have to live on benefits being sanctioned and having their support cut? And what about the lack of housing and the cost of private rent?

"It's ridiculous that you are working, doing the right thing and having to claim benefits.

"We have to reward hard work again in this country.

"We've got to build more homes, council housing and affordable housing.

"We should give councils the power to say to land owners you either use it or lose it."

How will you restore faith in politics and politicians?

"I'm taking a view that it's better to be straight with people about what we can and can't do.

"The biggest disappointment for people is broken promises. It's Nick Clegg (the Liberal Democrat leader) saying 'I'm not going to raise tuition fees' or it's David Cameron saying 'I'm not going to make any changes to hospitals' and then breaking their promises.

"I'm going to be frank with you about what I can and can't promise."

Wrapping up his hour-long session the Labour leader said: "Not everybody will have liked the answers. The country does face big challenges but these are challenges we can surmount. In the end it comes down to who is the country going to work for.

As well as the New Cross situation, Mr Miliband criticised neighbouring Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley for paying a temporary director up to £36,000 a month. He branded the apparent shortage of qualified bosses as 'ridiculous'.

He said he wanted to sort out the 'big mess' in accident and emergency which has led to New Cross being fined over waiting time targets at the same time it is taking on more patients who can no longer go to the re-named County Hospital in Stafford following the controversial downgrade of services. The Wolverhampton hospital has also had to find another £8 million – £38 million in total – for its new A&E department.

He told people who came to the Aquarius Ballroom in Hednesford he would not make 'false promises' on the NHS.

But he told Cheryl Porter of the Support Stafford Hospital campaign, which is seeking to stop services being downgraded: "My undertaking to you is we will look at it on a medical basis at Stafford and elsewhere."

He told another audience member: "We will look at the local situation here. Hospital closures should be medically led, not by penny-pinching."

Speaking to the Express & Star he said: "It's a big mess what the government has done and you can see it in A&E.

"A&E is the barometer of the health service. We are going to have to sort this out. The reason why there's record demand is they have made mistakes in relation to services outside hospital. If you cut access to GPs, don't have early diagnosis of illnesses, you pile up pressure on A&E. The answer is invest in the doctors, the nurses, the home care workers and the midwives to alleviate the pressure on A&E. We've got to back to being able to see a GP within 48 hours."

On the interim director in Dudley he said: "Well that's clearly a ridiculous situation that you don't have proper staffing in our NHS. You have to have the trained staff. It's clearly essential. The government is increasingly using agencies and consultants because they haven't got the plan or the trained staff." The Dudley Group said interim operations director Jon Scott had helped the A&E at Russells Hall meet its waiting times targets while many other hospitals failed.

Campaigners in Stafford have been opposing the cuts and transfer of services, which include complicated births and urgent care, from County Hospital to Royal Stoke University Hospital.

A&E is closed at night and people are having to go to Wolverhampton, Walsall and Stoke for treatment. Although there was applause for Mr Miliband, not everyone was pleased.

Julian Porter, one of the first people to camp out as part of the Support Stafford Hospital campaign, was disappointed that there was no firm commitment to restore downgraded services.

The 47-year-old from Brocton said: "I voted Labour for 30 years, but never again. Labour let Stafford Hospital down badly. They have not stood up and supported us." Meanwhile the trust that runs New Cross will pick up a huge fine for failing to hit national A&E targets in December. It was the unit's worst month of 2014 in terms of performance, with around 85 per cent of patients seen within four hours. The national target is 95 per cent and for the rest of the year the New Cross number never dipped below 90 per cent.

On the prospect of another coalition, Mr Miliband said: "The right thing for me to do is focus on what I want the election outcome to be, which is a majority Labour government. I think people have seen this coalition as an excuse for breaking promises."

He added: "Clearly there will have been people who wanted me to promise more things. I think you restore faith in politics not by making false promises, not by hiding yourself away and by facing tough questions about what we can do differently."