A vital accident and emergency department will start closing overnight, leaked documents have revealed.

Minutes from a business meeting between consultants at King George Hospital (KGH) in Goodmayes reveal proposals to close its A&E department after 8pm.

The minutes dated November 26 last year read: “AJO [KGH clinical lead Arikoge Ogedegbe] confirmed that the A&E department at KGH will definitely be closed.

“The proposal is that it will close at 8pm and all emergencies will be taken straight to Queen’s Hospital.”

But the plan has raised the question of whether people in Wanstead and Woodford, who live nearer to Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, would have to be taken to Queen’s Hospital in Romford after 8pm.

Wes Streeting MP, who heads the Save King George A&E campaign, said: “I think residents deserve to know, if they got into an emergency after 8pm, whether they would be taken just round the corner to Whipps or all the way to Romford.”

He also said the leak vindicated the claim he made in February that overnight closure plans were already underway, and which Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust (BHRUT) failed to confirm at the time.

The Ilford North MP said: “These leaked minutes show, as I warned earlier this year, the trust is indeed going to start night time closure of King George A&E when they can and the closure plan is being progressed.

“We must all accept the closure threat is real and come together as a community to fight it.”

Ex-Redbridge councillor Ruth Clark, currently the Conservative candidate in the Roding by-election, rubbished claims King George’s A&E was closing earlier this month and referred to the campaign to save it as “scaremongering”.

Mr Streeting has criticised such claims as “grossly complacent, negligent and ill-judged.”

BHRUT chief executive Matthew Hopkins said: "We have been talking to the regulators and other partners to test whether we could make changes to emergency and urgent care at King George Hospital in a phased way.

"That could include closing the Emergency Department at King George overnight initially.

"If the necessary reviews are passed, our board and our CCGs’ would then have to make a final decision to implement the changes.”

BHRUT received ‘requires improvement’ in its last Care Quality Commission inspection and reported some of its worst A&E waiting times since 2014 this week, with only 80.4 per cent of emergency patients being seen within four hours.