Hancock announces new hospital building programme

Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock has launched the ‘largest hospital building programme in a generation’, to ensure that the health service will have world-class facilities for patients and staff for the long term.

As part of a new Health Infrastructure Plan, the programme sets out a long-term programme of investment in health infrastructure, including capital to: build new hospitals; modernise our primary care estate; invest in new diagnostics and technology; and help eradicate critical safety issues in the NHS estate.

The plan’s main focus is a new hospital building programme, which the government launched with a £2.8 billion investment that gives six new large hospitals the funding to go ahead now, aiming to deliver by 2025. However, as Prime minister Boris Johnson declared that 40 new hospitals would be built earlier this year with the new funding, experts have questioned how much new money the government intends to put into the NHS.

Whipps Cross hospital, Epsom and St Helier trust, West Hertfordshire trust, Princess Alexandra Hospital trust, University Hospitals of Leicester trust and Leeds Teaching Hospitals trust will share £2.7 billion from the Treasury.

Anita Charlesworth, head of research and economics at the Health Foundation, said: “While this money is very much needed following years of underinvestment in the NHS’s crumbling infrastructure, it falls well short of the scale of the challenge. With a backlog of maintenance and repairs that amounts to more than £6 billion - much of which threatens patient’s safety – and dozens of NHS trust upgrade projects that have been delayed or cancelled, the figure needed is closer to £3 billion each year for the next five years.

“Such piecemeal funding makes it difficult for trusts to adequately plan their spending. What is ultimately needed is a substantial, long-term capital settlement which is allocated based on a clear assessment of the health care service’s needs.”