Work on some of the 40 new hospitals Boris Johnson promised to build by 2030 will not begin until 2039, after a Labour rethink on a pledge it called “a work of fiction” by the Conservatives.
The cost of completing the urgently needed new facilities has rocketed from £20bn to close to £50bn after years of limited progress since Johnson first promised them in 2019.
The delay to many of the projects has prompted warnings from the bosses of some of the hospitals affected that their decrepit buildings will not survive until the date they are now due to be replaced – as far away as the 2040s in some cases – and will either fall down or face “catastrophic failure” before then.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, told MPs on Monday that construction on 16 of the 40 projects in England would begin between 2025 and 2030. But there would be no spades in the ground at another nine sites until 2030-35 and at a further nine not until 2035-39, he said.
The revised timetable means hospitals that have been falling into ever deeper disrepair will have to keep treating patients in cramped and increasingly unsafe environments long into the future.
What Streeting called “an honest, realistic, deliverable timetable” means work on St Mary’s hospital in west London will not start until at least 2035, in the last of four “waves” of building. That is despite serious problems plaguing the site, which has some 180-year-old sections.
Prof Tim Orchard, the chief executive of Imperial healthcare NHS trust, which runs the hospital, said the delay was “devastating news for our communities, our staff and patients”. While he said he understood the programme had to be affordable for the government, “the simple truth is that St Mary’s hospital, in particular, will not last until the 2040s”.
Dr James Marsh is the deputy chief executive of a group of hospitals that has been planning for years to build a new emergency care hospital in Sutton in south London – work on which will now not start until potentially 2035. He said: “We have already had to condemn and demolish one of our wards. It’s only a matter of time before other parts of our hospital become unsafe for treating patients. We now need to plan and prepare for the catastrophic failure of our buildings, which could mean moving patient care into temporary buildings.”
The investment included a new specialist emergency care hospital in Sutton and a major upgrade to the facilities at St Helier hospital, which is in a dire state of disrepair.
Streeting acknowledged his announcement would cause concern, saying: “Patients in some parts of the country will be disappointed by this new timetable.” But he blamed the situation on the Tory government lying about the scheme, including the party’s most recent prime ministers, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Johnson, and on them failing to fund it.
The seven rebuilds in “wave zero”, which are already well advanced, would be completed by 2028, Streeting said. Wave one projects will begin between 2025 and 2030 and will comprise seven hospitals built with Raac concrete, which has become dangerously unstable, and nine other projects where a new facility is desperately needed.
Construction will start on nine wave two schemes including the Sutton facility in 2030-2035, and work on the final eight is due to start during 2035-39.
The cost of delivering the new hospitals has shot up to £48.7bn from the £20bn price the then health secretary, Steve Barclay, put on the work in May 2023. The Tories only spent £3.7bn on the programme.
Labour will put £15bn into each of the three future waves, comprising an average of £3bn a year for the 15 years between 2025 and 2039, to make the schemes a reality.
Under the Tories the new hospitals plan was “a programme built on the shaky foundations of false hope”, Streeting said in his statement. The new timetable was “a serious, credible plan to build the hospitals our NHS needs”.
Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat health and social care spokesperson, accused Labour of “a double betrayal”. She said: “The Conservatives shamelessly made promises they never intended to keep to countless communities served by crumbling hospitals. Now this government uses the day of Trump’s inauguration in a shoddy attempt to bury bad news, showing an outrageous disregard for patients.”
