NHS Capital Spending

Ian Roome Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Ian Roome (North Devon) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean) for introducing this important debate. I thank the Minister for visiting North Devon district hospital to see the estate for herself and for listening to the passionate pleas from NHS clinicians serving on the frontline.

The hospital is now the third of nine hospitals in wave 3 of the new hospital programme and faces a further 10-year wait for the capital funding it needs. That investment is desperately needed to replace an ancient intensive care unit and operating theatres that are nearly 50 years old. I thank the Government for approving phase 1, building new residences for staff and medical students, which will also recover land for the all-important clinical rebuild. On paper, however, phase 2 is unlikely to begin before 2035.

The cost of keeping these facilities running for another 10 years will be immense. Our hospital has a maintenance backlog of “high” and “critical” grade work of over £40 million, the most per square metre of any hospital in the south-west, higher even than many of the hospitals afflicted by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or RAAC. Our NHS trust worries, as I expect many people in this Chamber worry, that that is simply throwing good money after bad.

In January, the National Audit Office released its update on the new hospital programme, which makes it clear that the current Labour Government have tried to financially rescue a programme that the last Conservative Government had doomed to disaster. However, many of my constituents feel that they have lost out yet again. It is not only that patients in northern Devon are being asked to wait another 10 years for new critical care facilities, but the ever-increasing maintenance costs of keeping their ageing hospital going will demand a bigger and bigger share of NHS funding from the area.

Worse still, the Department of Health and Social Care says that hospitals built to the new hospital 2.0 standard are expected to deliver operational savings. Whose hospitals will really benefit from that approach? When I queried it in a written question, the Minister said on 13 February that trusts and integrated care boards manage budgets, and that the centralised new hospital programme does not redistribute savings. If an NHS trust is lucky enough to receive the capital spending for new facilities sooner rather than later, patients in that community will benefit twice; if not, tough luck.

Furthermore, the estimated cost of the scheme in my area given in the new hospital programme review seems to bear no relation to the bid originally submitted by the trust. The Government will not answer questions on the multi-criteria decision support analysis tool that is being used to score the bids for capital funding under the new hospital programme, nor even answer freedom of information requests to state the name of the provider of the tool. Consequently, we as parliamentarians are unable to scrutinise that detail.

I have some questions for the Minister. First, will the Department explain these cost estimates, because £1.5 billion is a vastly inflated figure, which is far beyond the 50% adjustment stated in the review? That should not delay work on NHS hospitals such as mine in North Devon. The trust is ready to build the next phase now, so if there is any capital available, please bear North Devon in mind. In addition, what else can the Government do in the coming years to avoid entrenching real health inequalities in communities such as mine in North Devon?