Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital: Redevelopment

Lord Tebbit Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, on securing this brief debate on the future of the RNOH at Stanmore. I first came to know the hospital some 30 years ago when my wife was transferred there from Stoke Mandeville to continue her rehabilitation from the injuries she had suffered in the attempt by IRA/Sinn Fein to murder Prime Minister Thatcher. Indeed, until this year when the deterioration in her health has made the journey there from our home in East Anglia too arduous for her, my wife had continued to be a patient at Stanmore.

Through those years, we have also seen the development of the splendid charitable trust facilities to provide for both able-bodied and disabled people alongside the hospital, and they are an important part of the whole complex. Less happily, we have also seen the inability of successive Governments to get on with the long overdue replacement of the tatty, inefficient buildings which have hampered the skilled and loyal staff in their offering of the treatment needed by patients, not least the spinally injured ones, from around London and the Home Counties. We know that the extent of recovery from serious spinal injury is critically dependent on whether the patient can receive immediate care in a specialist unit. That is why Stanmore is so important to London and the Home Counties. I have lobbied many Ministers for many years over this rebuilding programme. At least it is now a great comfort that the most pernicious proposal—and I use that word as I usually use words, in its literal sense—of a PFI has been rejected. They are the most awful device which has ever been created in an attempt to dodge the rules of public sector accounting.

It seems, at last, that something like the charitable finance initiative, proposed by Mr Laurie Marsh and others, to finance the rebuilding of the hospital out of the profits from residential development of surplus land, is now to go ahead. I am, however, still concerned that—if I read the briefings right—the development of the surplus land is expected to yield only £20 million. That seems a pathetically small sum of money to come from the sale and development of residential land in the Stanmore area. It is extraordinarily small, and I hope that the Minister will look very closely at how that sum has been reached. Finally, I give heartfelt thanks for the great kindness and the care which my wife received at Stanmore, and I say to my noble friend Lord Prior, come on, for goodness’ sake get on with it.