Hospital Building Programme

Maria Miller Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair today, Mr Sharma. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan) on securing the debate. He is absolutely right to say that our hospitals are the centre of our communities. That is absolutely the case in my constituency of Basingstoke. Of course, care is provided by our doctors, our nurses and all the staff involved in running the hospital, but it is also one of my largest local employers. I congratulate the Minister, who I am pleased to see still in his place, on all the work he is doing to ensure that the Government’s commitments to build 40 new hospitals by 2030, the other eight previously committed to and upgrades to more than 70 hospitals, are being progressed as fast as they can be.

My hospital is a similar age to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich. Like his, Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital was built to last 30 years, back in the 1970s. The backlog of maintenance reflects the fact that it should have been replaced many years ago. Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, an excellent trust that serves my community, was already well advanced with plans for a new hospital when the Government also identified that the current hospital needed replacing and included it in the renewal programme.

Basingstoke hospital has served our community extremely well since the 1970s, but the buildings are reaching the end of their useful life, for many of the reasons that Members have gone through. Those buildings were not built to last any longer. Furthermore, estimates show that the population that is served by the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will increase by around 23% between 2018 and 2050. Unlike many areas of the country, Basingstoke has continued to build houses not just for the last two decades but for the last four decades. We have grown extraordinarily as a town over that time, served by the same hospital. Our population is therefore rapidly ageing, with all the implications that brings for our health services. Our over-75s population in Hampshire will have increased by a shocking 35% between 2017 and 2024. I should not be surprised about that, given the level of house building.

So many of the people who moved to Basingstoke when it rapidly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s are reaching an age where they are much more reliant on the health services available. The Government need to make sure that they follow through not only on more recent commitments to building houses, particularly in the south-east, but on the commitments that date back many decades, when people were encouraged from London out to places such as Basingstoke. That is an ageing population, and the Government need to ensure that the right facilities are in place for that much bigger population.

I am fortunate in Basingstoke that all the organisations involved in planning for the new hospital are working together in exemplary fashion, through an organisation that has been formed called Hampshire Together, which is all about modernising our hospitals and health services. That organisation firmly welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcements in October that all NHS trusts that receive seed funding to develop a business case for a new hospital project as part of phase 2 of the health infrastructure plan 2 programme, including Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will be fully funded to deliver those by 2030.

The trust was especially pleased to note that Hampshire Together had been earmarked for inclusion in first group of HIP2 projects due for completion. The trust’s plans are well-developed with a preferred site, which the Minister already knows a little about, at junction 7 on the M3, which has been identified by the ambulance services as the best location to save more lives, providing acute care for hundreds of thousands of people living in the rapidly expanding communities in north and mid Hampshire. The planning authorities of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council and Hampshire County Council are working actively and positively together, and Hampshire hospitals have been working to put together their business case and have forwarded their cases to the Department. They are very much looking forward to putting those cases out to public consultation as soon as possible.

Because our house building has been so rapid in Basingstoke throughout the 50 years that our hospital has been in existence, there is a need for a new hospital now. We would value a commitment from the Minister on the timelines and the next round of seed funding, so that we can continue to develop the business case and will be able to start building from 2025. I also renew my offer for the Minister to visit Basingstoke to see the site that we have already earmarked for the construction of the hospital. It is a greenfield site, so that residents’ enjoyment of the hospital facilities will not be disrupted during the building process.

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[Edward Argar]

I omitted to mention two things to the shadow Minister: the spending review and backlog maintenance—he always avails himself of the opportunity to gently raise that issue. We have seen a confirmation of the money already in place for the new hospital programme, but we have also seen further moneys announced for capital in the spending review—new money—for example, just over £5 billion for community diagnostic centres, surgical hubs and the IT infrastructure around that. We have therefore seen a reconfirmation of money, plus new money in the capital space.

I turn now to maintenance, which the shadow Minister rightly always highlights. He will know—he occasionally quotes it at me at the Dispatch Box—that backlog maintenance across the entire estate is around £9 billion-worth. That is pretty constant from the previous financial year; it has not particularly increased. It may have gone up by a tiny fraction, but it has remained broadly constant.

[Mrs Miller]

rose—

[Mike Amesbury]

rose—

[Edward Argar]

Let me just finish this point before I take interventions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke and then the hon. Member for Weaver Vale.

Our investment in new hospitals will also significantly reduce the backlog maintenance, because it will take out of the total a number of hospitals, some of which have been mentioned, that are being propped up day after day, with money being spent just to patch up and mend.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank the Minister for agreeing to come to our new preferred site in Basingstoke—we will be grateful for that—and for his comment about backlog maintenance. I think Basingstoke is in the top three in the country for backlog maintenance.

May I press the Minister on the timelines of the next round of seed funding to develop business cases and to be able to start building our new hospital in 2025? Clarity on some of these timelines is essential not only for our communities but for the people developing the plans, because they need to know what will happen next and have clarity on that.

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, and I entirely understand her call for clarity. Each case is being looked at on an individual basis, in the allocation of the £3.7 billion. The senior responsible officer of the new hospitals programme, Natalie Forrest, is in regular discussion with each trust, but business cases, more funding to develop business cases, and movement from outline business cases to final business cases are done on a case-by-case basis by trusts. It is not the case that every one must submit them by a fixed time.

[Mrs Miller]

rose—

[Edward Argar]

Let me take the hon. Member for Weaver Vale first, because I promised him that I would give way. I also want to leave a few minutes at the end for my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich to wind up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Edward Argar]

I suspect that the Department will have heard my right hon. Friend’s point.

[Mrs Miller]

Will the Minister give way?

[Edward Argar]

Very briefly, because I want to leave some time for my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich.

[Mrs Miller]

This is really important. What the Minister has just said is that no part of the process should be held up because certain projects might be ahead of others. Therefore, the public consultation that stands ready to go live in Basingstoke should not be delayed for any reason other than hopefully getting ministerial approval.

[Edward Argar]

I take the point, and I think I understand where my right hon. Friend is coming from on this. I said that business cases will be considered on their own merits, but of course there has to be phasing of different trusts at different times and different phases of this programme, because of the profiling of that funding. Only £3.7 billion has been committed so far, with more to come in further spending reviews, so if every trust came forward and said, “We are ready”—as my right hon. Friend knows, many will do so, although I suspect she would say that her trust is genuinely ready compared with some others—we could not commit to every one of those, because we have to look at the financial profiling that the Treasury has given us about when that money becomes available. That is the point. I hope she will forgive me if I did not understand what she was getting at in the first instance, but I hope that is of some help.

I will conclude, in order to leave my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich a little time to wind up. As a Government, we are proud that we have committed to arguably the largest and most ambitious new hospital building programme in decades, with initial moneys of £3.7 billion put in place to get that programme going. Eight of those new hospitals are in construction and one is completed, and we look forward to delivering on that commitment in full by 2030.