Healthcare: Carshalton and Wallington

Maggie Throup Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maggie Throup)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) on bringing forward this important debate and on his commitment to tackling the range of health and social care issues that affect his constituents. A new hospital for Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust is part of our plans to build 40 new hospitals by 2030—the biggest hospital building programme in a generation.

The new hospital programme team is working closely with all schemes in the programme on how and when new hospitals will be built across the decade. I thank my hon. Friend for his praise and support for the new hospital programme. He campaigns tirelessly for his constituents, despite local opposition on purely political grounds. I assure him that we remain fully committed to the delivery of a new hospital for Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust to deliver improved local health outcomes.

The new hospitals will transform the way we deliver healthcare infrastructure for the NHS, prioritising sustainability, digital technology and the latest construction methods. This will result in outdated infrastructure being replaced by facilities for staff and patients—in his constituency and across the country—that are on the cutting edge of modern technology, innovation and sustainability. As my hon. Friend said, we can learn lessons from the covid pandemic to ensure that we future-proof our infrastructure.

The trust and the programme are working closely together on options for a new specialist emergency care hospital at the Sutton site, while general acute services remain in the current Epsom and St Helier hospitals. The programme team is in regular and ongoing discussion with the trust regarding the development of their plans, in line with the overall programme approach for delivery. This includes working closely on the trust’s expectations for the build and ensuring that those are in line with the financial envelope across the whole programme. The individual allocation for the scheme will be determined only once the respective full business case has been reviewed and agreed.

To date, the new hospital programme has approved over £31 million in public dividend capital allocation to the trust for a variety of works related to the scheme. This includes fees for design works, enabling funding for the construction of a multi-storey car park as part of the scheme, and a contribution towards the costs of a new electronic patient record system. Further allocations to the scheme will be decided through the proper process as the scheme is progressed.

The new hospital programme is working collaboratively with trusts across the programme to ensure that their plans get the most from available funding, while avoiding repetition of work and ensuring that the principles of repeatable deign, modern methods of construction and net carbon zero are met. This will maximise the potential benefits of a programmatic approach to the scheme, resulting in the best possible value for money to the taxpayer and improved health outcomes for local constituents.

I will briefly talk more widely about the ambitions of the new hospital programme and our wider investment in our nation’s hospital infrastructure. The Government have been doing incredibly ambitious work, providing substantial capital investment to support the biggest hospital building programme in a generation. On 2 October 2020, an initial £3.7 billion of funding was confirmed to support the delivery of 40 new hospitals, with a further eight schemes invited to bid for future funding to deliver 48 hospitals by 2030.

I am pleased that six of the hospitals in the programme are already in construction, including the Royal United Hospital Bath, which is the first of the 40 new hospitals to begin construction. In addition, on 19 August 2021, the Secretary of State opened the Northern Centre for Cancer Care, the first of the eight hospitals confirmed by the previous Government that now form part of the new hospital programme.

This hospital building programme is in addition to significant upgrades to over 70 hospitals, worth £1.7 billion, and a wider programme of capital investment. The commitment to fund a programme of new hospitals is an exciting opportunity to build the next generation of intelligent healthcare facilities, as well as to embed a long-term capability for future capital investments within the NHS.

While this major scheme gets under way, we are supporting Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust with other capital investments, including £6.1 million for the expansion of the emergency department and same-day emergency care unit at St Helier Hospital and the extension of waiting room space and mental health cubicles at Epsom hospital; £7.4 million for the relocation of services from the New Epsom and Ewell Cottage Hospital to Epsom General Hospital; and £11.6 million to eradicate the backlog in maintenance across the estate. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the amazing contribution our health and care staff have made during the pandemic—none more so than those serving the constituency of my hon. Friend.

In conclusion, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for all the work he is doing to support the new hospital scheme for Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. My Department and I look forward to continuing to work closely with him, and we are happy to arrange a meeting with him and his colleagues, and to work with the trust, as these important and ambitious plans continue to develop and come to fruition, and as they deliver improved healthcare outcomes in Carshalton and Wallington and the surrounding area.

Question put and agreed to.