Nearly twice as many people who went to accident and emergency in England in 2019-20 came from the 10 per cent of the population living in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived, according to figures released by NHS Digital.

The figures reveal that 3.1 million and 1.6 million people from the most and least deprived areas respectively attended A&E over the course of those 12 months.

It also showed the number of visits to A&E increased last year to 25 million from 24.8 million in 2018-19. The figure for 2019-20 was 17 per cent up on 2010-11 when there were 21.4 million visits.

Monday was shown to be the busiest day of the week with 16 per cent or 3.63 million of all visits in 2019-20. There were 1.95 million revisits to A&E within seven days.

Waiting times alo increased, with over half a million people spending over 12 hours in A&E in 2019-20 compared with 333,000 the year before.