Half of the new hospitals promised by Boris Johnson will not be built for years NHS
At least half of the 40 new hospitals promised by Boris Johnson will not be built for many years, the Guardian has learned, in a move described as “devastating” for staff and patients.
Labor will announce that several crumbling NHS hospitals in England that were due to be replaced by 2030 will not be completed within the original timeframe.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, will blame the Conservatives for leaving Labor with a huge infrastructure project that was not budgeted until last March and whose costs have risen to an estimated £30bn.
The announcement, which is likely to be made early next week, will leave many trusts concerned that patients will continue to be treated in dangerous environments and in buildings that are not fit for purpose.
The bosses of the affected trusts will be angry and the decision could spark criticism from local MPs when a government review of the program is published.
In September, Stretching said 12 of the 40 projects, which included new buildings within hospitals and refurbishments, could go ahead, including seven that faced imminent risk of collapse because they contained Raac concrete.
But he also ordered a review of the cost, feasibility and timeline for moving forward at 25 other hospitals that include old and dilapidated hospitals, parts of which are collapsing and increasingly disrupting patient care.
The delays follow a detailed examination by the Treasury, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England, which included examining the funds involved. The cost will now be spread over a longer period.
Streeting will say that delayed redevelopments will eventually occur and will give revised costs for the program. Many of the works are already at an advanced stage, and the Trusts say they are all urgently needed.
The Treasury Department, grappling with bleak public finances, played a major role in dramatically cutting back on the new hospital program.
“While we need to wait for the full details of the review… pausing or delaying hospital rebuilding plans is likely to be a false economy,” said Siva Anandaseva, policy director at the King’s Fund’s Center for Health Research. [as] Many hospitals already spend large sums of taxpayer funding trying to maintain substandard buildings.
“It is abundantly clear that the dilapidated state of some NHS buildings and equipment in both hospital and out-of-hospital settings is harming patients and staff and hampering attempts to improve NHS productivity.”
The Liberal Democrats said abandoning long-term plans to rebuild the 40 hospitals as expected “would be completely unacceptable”.
“Patients in these communities have been told that these hospitals will save their local health service. Depriving them of what they were promised and the better care they deserve would be completely unacceptable,” said Helen Morgan, the party’s spokesperson for health and social care.
She added: “The case of this program is a shocking indictment of the contempt the Tories have for patients in these communities. But the new Labor government’s lack of ambition for them is equally shocking.
“To kick these projects into the long grass and put them in a very difficult pile shows everything that is wrong with ministers’ attitude to the health service.”
Hospitals whose futures were considered by the review regularly experience problems caused by the fragile state of their infrastructure as a result of frequent delays and uncertainty surrounding the programme.
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Epsom and St Helier in Surrey had to cancel nearly 300 eye surgeries last summer when their operating theater ventilation system failed. Likewise, Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, closed two operating theaters for weeks and canceled 36 operations due to failure of its air handling units. Health Services Journal reported.
In a letter sent in September to all MPs in England announcing the review, Streeting warned that the NHP was likely to be cut in size, with some projects delayed for many years.
Streeting said: “Given that we inherited a program that was not funded beyond March 2025, and a wider financial legacy that was very challenging, we may have to consider reorganizing the schemes so that they can go ahead when financial circumstances allow.
“A structured and agreed renewable investment approach means that going ahead with these schemes will be subject to investment decisions in future spending reviews.”
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the risks from hospital collapses were now so great that some were “downright serious”.
Some of the failing hospitals, such as Stepping Hill in Stockport, are not included in the NHP’s list of 40 schemes, despite having serious problems.
The NHS’s lack of capital funding to repair and rebuild facilities past the end of their natural lives was demonstrated last week when Barking and Havering NHS Trust in Essex put up posters at Queen’s Hospital in Romford asking patients to write to their local MPs – one of these The posters include Streeting – asking them to support its efforts to raise £35m to expand A&E.
It is so overcrowded that it sometimes has to handle twice the 350 patients it was built to handle each day. It is also not in the new hospital program.
A DHSC spokesperson said: “We will publish the results of the NHP review shortly, but we are committed to delivering all hospital projects.
“The new hospital program we inherited was not deliverable, and funding is due to run out in March 2025. We are working to a reasonable and affordable timetable, and will announce the results of the review in due course.”