Business
Public accounts committee MPs challenged plans for the revised new hospital programme warning that spending and initiating timeframes ‘didn’t stack up’.
NHS procurement chiefs printed the new hospital programme changed into costed on the premise that contractors using fashionable concepts of construction would form 25% more affordable and 20% sooner than outdated hospital projects.
But final standardised 2.0 hospital designs is no longer going to done till subsequent Could perhaps perhaps also just. These are serious because they’ll count carefully on offsite assembly and consume of repeat components and specifications across the programme.
MPs were also concerned relating to the additional impacts the RAAC concrete disaster would possess on the ambitious plans.
No longer no longer up to 23 more hospitals were identified with RAAC considerations wanting mitigation works budgeted at £685m on high of the seven RAAC hospitals lately moved into the new hospital programme for entire rebuilds.
PAC chairwoman Meg Hillier warned that the National Audit Plot of enterprise had already declared it believed only 32 hospital may be delivered.
NHS officials mentioned the programme would price £21bn, even though mountainous costings of the 5 cohorts of projects to be built added up to £38bn, warned Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP.
So a ways the first two hospitals in the new hospital programme – the National Rehabilitation Centre and Moorfield Search Hospital – are for this reason of be delivered in 2024 and 2025 with the final for this reason of be started and done in the next seven years.
Procurement chiefs are planning to share the monumental programme between honest four contractors, which Sir Geoffrey warned would trigger inflationary pressures.
He called on the NHS chiefs to build of living out an fully costed and timetable list of projects to clarify the initiating thought.
Shona Dunn, everlasting secretary, Department of Successfully being and Social Care, mentioned: “This is a really massive and delicate most principal Authorities programme that is no longer honest constructing 40 hospitals, it is a ways attempting to shift the formulation whereby we form hospital infrastructure.
“I completely settle for therefore right here is a timeframe on the outset of that most principal programme where we’re handing over hospital 2.0, we’re changing the skill to the initiating of that infrastructure and you are rather appropriate to mumble we count on that vary of skill getting cash in whisper to form to those time frames.
“So what I am saying is the new previous wishes to no longer be a trademark of what occurs over the next seven years.”
Commenting on the programme initiating plans, Price Francois MP mentioned the division’s confidence that it can presumably also form the final 39 hospitals in only seven years after only handing over one in the first three years “defied logic”
“This is basically worse than the MoD and that is saying one thing,” he added.