Local Hospitals' Upgrade Delayed for a Decade
Charing Cross and Hammersmith in the final wave of investment
Charing Cross Hospital
January 22, 2025
There has been a mixed reaction to the announcement of the government’s plans for hospital repair which will not see work start on local facilities such as Charing Cross and Hammersmith Hospital for over a decade.
Professor Tim Orchard, Chief Executive of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the two hospitals as well as St. Mary’s in Paddington said it was ‘devastating news for our communities, our staff and patients, and for the whole of the capital’s healthcare system’.
The three Imperial hospitals are all included in the fourth and final wave of investment promised by the government, for which construction is not expected to start until 2035 to 2038. The upgrades of Hammersmith and St. Mary’s is expected to cost £2billion each with Hammersmith with Charing Cross costing £1.5billion.
The government’s New Hospital Programme (NHP) is an update of the plan announced by Boris Johnson as part of his manifesto in 2019 in which he pledged to deliver 40 new hospitals by 2030.
In 2023 the National Audit Office warned the 2030 target was likely to be missed, and more hospitals have been added to the project over time. Labour gave the go-ahead to 21 schemes in September, work on some of which had already begun, and launched a review into the rest of the programme.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting on Monday (20 January) announced that the original NHP was unaffordable in the short term and that funding would instead be released in waves. “This is the most efficient and cost-effective way of giving our NHS the buildings it needs, giving the construction sector the certainty it needs to deliver,” he said. “We are backing this plan with investment which will increase up to £15 billion over each consecutive five-year wave, averaging around £3 billion a year from 2030.”
Mr Streeting said upon taking office last year he was ‘shocked’ to find that the funding was not available for the NHP beyond March, describing it as ‘built on the shaky foundation of false hope’.
“If I was shocked by the state of this programme, patients ought to be furious. Not only because the promises made to them were never going to be kept. They also desperately need new buildings and new hospitals.”
Ben Coleman, Labour MP for Chelsea and Fulham, said that alongside the lack of funding or timetable for the NHP, the former Conservative government had removed Charing Cross, St Mary’s and Hammersmith from the scheme. He added there remains an affordability issue, and that the government ‘doesn’t have the money to move as fast as we all want them to’.
“This announcement is very disappointing for residents, patients and healthcare staff across West London. It is a bitter legacy of the Conservatives’ failure to stick up for our local hospitals and their lies about having secured the funding needed. As we face the scale of the problem head on, I will be challenging ministers to do more and will be working with the leadership team at Imperial to develop alternative funding approaches.”
Cllr Paul Swaddle, Leader of the Conservative Group on Westminster City Council, said, “Labour has let us all down again, and then slipped the news out on a busy news day that included the US Presidential inauguration in the hope we wouldn’t notice.”
Professor Orchard added, “We understand that the government’s New Hospital Programme must be affordable but the simple truth is that St Mary’s Hospital, in particular, will not last until the 2040s.
“We run London’s busiest major trauma centre and care for more than a million patients a year. We need to digest the detail of today’s announcement, but we have to find a way to progress our schemes more quickly. This includes exploring alternative funding approaches, leveraging the value of our land that will be surplus to requirements and the significant contribution of our life science partnerships to local and national economic growth.”
Professor Orchard also spoke on the delays at Tuesday’s (21 January) North West London Acute Provider Collaborative Board in Common meeting. He said all three hospitals have major issues, from closed wards to flooding, and highlighted the expected £1.5bn financial contribution St Mary’s is to make if the site is redeveloped.
According to data compiled by the BBC last year, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust had the largest high-risk repair backlog in England. It sat at £393m for 2022/23, roughly 20 per cent of the national total.
Ben Lynch – Local Democracy Reporter