At least half of the 40 new hospitals pledged by Boris Johnson will not be built until the 2040s, in a move described as “devastating” for staff and patients, The Guardian has learned.
Labor is preparing to announce that several crumbling NHS hospitals in England, due to be replaced by 2030, have been effectively removed from the construction programme.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, will blame the Conservatives for leaving Labor with a huge infrastructure project that was only 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 around 20 reconstruction operations in limbo, forcing many patients to continue treatment in increasingly dangerous environments and buildings that are unfit for purpose.
The heads of the affected trusts will be furious, 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 builds 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.
Sources say that only a few of those 25 – perhaps five or fewer – will go ahead, because ministers cannot find the money to go ahead.
Labor will say the range of planned redevelopments will no longer be included in the list of those with money allocated or a completion date. 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 – has played a major role in dramatically scaling back the new hospital program. Projects that are downgraded will be “consigned to the long grass” because they will not go ahead except at an unspecified stage in the future.
“While we need to wait for the full details of the review, it will be devastating for staff and patients to hear that plans to rebuild local hospitals may be postponed so far, with real doubts now over whether some of these hospitals have been deprioritised,” said Siva Anandaseva, director of policy. At the King’s Fund Health Research Centre, “hospitals will never be rebuilt.”
“Stopping or delaying hospital rebuilding plans is also likely to be a false economy,” he added [as] Many hospitals already spend large sums of taxpayer funding trying to maintain substandard buildings.
The Liberal Democrats said abandoning long-term plans to rebuild so many of the 40 hospitals “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 throw 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.” Like the long delay in social care reform, this shows that Labor is “more satisfied with dithering and delaying than delivering our NHS”.
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Hospitals whose futures were considered by the review regularly experience problems caused by the fragile state of the infrastructure as a result of frequent delays and significant uncertainty surrounding the programme.
For example, Epsom and St Helier in Surrey had to cancel nearly 300 eye surgeries last summer when their operating room ventilation system failed. Likewise, Princess Alexandra Hospital in Essex closed two operating rooms for weeks, and canceled 36 operations, due to failure of air handling units. Health Services Journal reported.
In a letter sent in September to every parliamentarian in England announcing the establishment of the review, Streeting warned that the NHP was likely to be cut back, 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.”
The risks from hospital collapses are now so great that some are “downright dangerous,” Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, recently told The Guardian.
Some of the failing hospitals, such as Stepping Hill in Stockport, are not included in the NHP’s list of 40 schemes, despite having major 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 – who included Streeting – asking them to support its efforts to raise £35m to expand A&E. The hospital is so overcrowded that it sometimes has to handle twice the 350 patients a day it was built to accommodate, said Matthew Trainer, the foundation’s chief executive.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The new hospital program we inherited was not deliverable and funding is due to run out in March 2025.” Review in a timely manner.”