New Hospital Programme and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) on securing it. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken). St Mary’s Hospital, which I will mainly concentrate my remarks on, is located in her constituency but is the main hospital serving my constituents in north Westminster.

There is a feeling that this is déjà vu all over again. In April 2019, my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and I spoke in a very similarly titled debate on the Imperial hospitals programme. I said:

“In January 2018, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust gained full planning permission for the first phase of the redevelopment of St. Mary’s”

as part of the overall redevelopment of the trust. I said that the

“failure to gain funding and approval from key stakeholders…is a key risk on the trust’s corporate risk register, because the conditions of St Mary’s Hospital have deteriorated so much…the structural issues in the hospital have become absolutely and imminently challenging.”—[Official Report, 24 April 2019; Vol. 658, c. 354WH.]

That case has intensified in the intervening years, as I will come to in a moment.

That was four years ago. A couple of weeks ago, we had the announcement that the main funding for the Imperial hospitals scheme has been pushed back beyond the start date of 2030. Other hospitals have been prioritised. Many of the 40 hospitals have received their commitment to proceed on the original timescale, but not St Mary’s or the Imperial hospitals. As the chief executive of the trust board said, that is very disappointing news.

The 40-hospital building programme was a key feature of the 2019 general election. Conservative candidates took advantage of the opportunity to pose outside St Mary’s Hospital and put the pictures on social media and in their campaign literature. One enthusiastically announced:

“We are helping rebuild St Mary’s hospital…Great to talk to Matt Hancock”

—the then Secretary of State for Health—

“about what it means for local residents”.

The Conservative Assembly Member for West Central, even more enthusiastically, talked about how she looked forward to talking to the BBC about the plans to completely refurbish Charing Cross and Hammersmith Hospitals and rebuild St Mary’s. Four years on, St Mary’s is still the hospital with the largest maintenance backlog in the country, and it has been left behind in the programme. That goes far beyond being yet another example of a broken promise.

There are two key issues. The first, which my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster have alluded to, is the centrality of the St Mary’s and Imperial trust life sciences campus as a leading centre for biomedical research. This is an incredibly exciting project that is part of this country’s scientific renewal—it could not be more important for the locality or the country—but to be honest, it is hard to sustain the necessary investment or the recruitment and retention of staff in a project of that kind in a crumbling hospital building.

But even more important is the central question of the condition of the hospital—all three of them, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith said, but particularly, from my point of view, St Mary’s—and its implications for patient care and public money. Put simply, this is about wasting money on routine maintenance and repairs to patch up a building that has for many years been recognised as being in need of a transformative rebuild; indeed, the plans have been proceeding on that basis.

I spoke four years ago about the litany of floods, fires and ceiling collapses that we have had to deal with in our hospital estate. However, some recent examples include the closure of the gynaecology day services unit due to the failure of the air handling unit, and the flooding of the Paterson surgical centre—both of which led to two weeks-worth of clinical activities being suspended—as well as flooding in the main out-patient building caused by a sewage blockage, a partial ceiling collapse in an in-patient ward, and sewage leaks into the bottom of the Queen Elizabeth building and into the pharmacy. These problems not only inconvenience patients and delay treatment; they demand ever more ad hoc spending, which is running at an estimated £6 million to £7 million every year, and there is a long list of repair work that needs to be done.

We know that the new hospital cannot be rebuilt overnight, but it is essential that the hospital redevelopment stays within the framework of the timescale that we have been working to over the last few years, since the programme of 40 hospitals became such a key element of the Government’s planning. St Mary’s and the Imperial NHS trust need Government support, and they need it fast.

I have two questions that I would like the Minister to answer today. Will any slippage in the hospital building programme, from other hospitals in the scheme, enable any assistance to be carried over to help Imperial and St Mary? Will the Government also commit to adopting an alternative funding approach to help that scheme—which is being led by a highly skilled, highly experienced team of clinicians and advisers—as a matter of urgency? A scheme is ready to move, but it needs Government support, and the people of Westminster need that hospital to be delivered fast.