Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between James Wild and Simon Clarke

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

14. What steps his Department is taking with the Department of Health and Social Care to help ensure scrutiny of NHS trusts’ capital spending.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Simon Clarke)]

It has just been announced, through the spending review, that the NHS will receive: over £12 billion of capital funding for investment in and maintenance of the NHS estate; £5.9 billion for diagnostics, technology and elective recovery; £4.2 billion for at least 70 hospital upgrades and 40 new hospitals; and funding to eradicate mental health dormitories. That is on top of £500 million of additional capital funding given for the second half of this year to help tackle the elective backlog. It means that NHS capital budgets will have increased by over 8% year-on-year above inflation since the start of the Parliament.

[James Wild]

I welcome the funding for the new hospitals programme, and highlight to the Minister that the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, with 200 props holding up its structurally deficient roof, has a compelling case to be one of the new schemes. Given the inevitable need to rebuild the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is far better to have a properly funded new hospital using modern methods of construction, rather than its being an unplanned cost, with emergency funding constantly being needed to prop up its failing building?