Hospitals

Mark Ferguson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan]

The hon. Member will be aware that there were not 40 new hospitals—they were not all hospitals and there were not 40 of them. The issue here is that the start dates for work on many hospitals that need urgent rebuilding have been pushed back into the 2030s, long beyond the life of this Parliament. The people who are served by those hospitals were promised new facilities and have not had them. That is devastating for those communities.

If the Conservative approach was contemptible, Labour’s approach has been to procrastinate. The cost to the NHS of papering over the cracks and keeping hospitals running past their natural lifespan is enormous. That is why the Government must reverse the delay to the new hospital programme at once and urgently deliver the new hospitals that patients have long been promised.

[Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab)]

I wonder if the hon. Member can explain to me how spending £22 billion extra on the national health service this year can in any way be described as procrastination.

[Helen Morgan]

It is important to recognise that the additional investment in the NHS amounts to about £10 billion a year—according to Office for Budget Responsibility numbers, which I am sure the hon. Gentleman has looked at—because of the cost of national insurance hikes and of compensating other public sector employers for those hikes. The £22 billion figure is somewhat misleading. The point that we are making is that it is a false economy to keep those buildings going, to keep repairing a crumbling estate, to keep patching up and putting a sticking plaster on those problems. Those buildings need to be demolished and rebuilt, so that approach is a false economy. It would be much better to build new buildings up front and save on future repair costs. We need to ensure that no one is treated in broken, uncomfortable and unsafe facilities. Repairing and replacing crumbling, substandard hospitals is not only vital for delivering better care and treating-more patients, but crucial for rebuilding the economy after years of Conservative economic vandalism.

How much would all this cost? In my county of Shropshire, the cost of the maintenance backlog across all sites has reached about £75 million. I am sure that everyone here would agree that £75 million is a lot of money—indeed, it is so much that it is the total amount of Government capital investment for hospices this year—but in terms of hospital maintenance it is a drop in the ocean. Torbay hospital needs more than £50 million to clear the backlog, Watford hospital has a backlog of £63 million, and Hull royal infirmary requires an eye-watering £70 million. Across England, the figure is a colossal £13.8 billion—and that is just to bring our existing hospital estate to the minimum standard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Johnson]

I must confess to not being terribly au fait with the position of Charing Cross hospital in 2012, which was before I was elected. It is not a hospital in which I have worked as a doctor, but I am advised that it was my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt), when he was Health Secretary, who kept it open, and I am sure that local residents will be disappointed that this Labour Government have chosen not to rebuild it until 2035.

Will Labour—in an attempt to fill the black holes of their creation—return to private finance initiative contracts, to bridge the gap between the spending that they want and the fiscal situation that they have created? I saw at first hand the disastrous agreements that were reached, which led to extortionate costs and ridiculous inflexibility. Let me give just one example. I remember being very pleased to have an office of my own for the first time when, as a doctor, I was promoted. I was given a desk, a computer and a large whiteboard. When I asked, “How do I get this put up on the wall?”, I was told, “You can’t have it put up on the wall, because it would cost £800.” That was more than a decade ago. I thought, “Why is it costing £800?” and I said, “I can go and buy some ‘no nails’ from the local hardware store and put it up myself!” I was then told, “You can’t do that, because a deal was negotiated, and it would be against the contract.”

In total, there are about 700 PFI contracts with a capital value of £57 billion, and there is about £160 billion still to be paid for them and their maintenance. During covid, in 2020-21, analysis from The Guardian found that nearly half a billion pounds was being spent purely on interest charges. That is money that is not being spent on patient care, and it is a long-lasting legacy from the last time a Labour Government were in power and trying to get around their fiscal rules. These were fundamentally bad deals. Yet again, we see that when Labour negotiates, the taxpayer loses.

Despite 14 years in opposition, Labour came to office without a plan for what it actually wanted to do for the NHS. Instead, we have seen review after review and consultation after consultation, with very little action or delivery in return for what this means for patients and the taxpayer. The Labour Government hiked taxes on general practices, community pharmacies and even children’s hospices, only to give them some of that money back and expect them to be grateful for it. They cut the winter fuel payment for millions of the most vulnerable people in the country, and then sat back and watched as the number of pensioners attending A&E this winter soared. They caved in to the trade union demands with an inflation-busting pay rise in return for no modernisation or productivity reforms, and the threats to strike again are already back. They scrapped our productivity plan, which we had already fully funded and which would have unlocked billions in savings by the end of the decade.

[Mark Ferguson]

I have a question to which I know the answer. The question is “How many new hospitals were built in the last five years?” and the answer, of course, is “Zero”. Is it not the case that the 40 new hospitals promised by the last Government were not new and were not hospitals, and there certainly were not 40 of them?

[Dr Johnson]

Actually, we use the definition of “new hospitals” that Tony Blair used when he was Prime Minister.

Let us turn to where we are now. We welcome the capital funding to continue the programmes that we started in government for new surgical hubs and diagnostics, but how much of the additional capital funding allocated in the last Budget will be used to carry out repairs in hospitals that should be rebuilt? Let me repeat the question asked by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan). Will those delays cost more money, both because work that would otherwise be unnecessary will have to be done to keep hospitals open and because of inflation, which is rising under this Government? How much extra will the national insurance jobs tax cost the contractors building the new hospitals and undertaking maintenance and repairs? Those additional costs will be passed on to the NHS. Will that mean less repair work being undertaken, or will the Government make cuts elsewhere—and if they do, where will those cuts fall? The Chancellor has already hiked taxes on working people and businesses, and today we saw that borrowing has also increased by £30 billion a year, with debt piling up and inflation on the rise. How does the Minister intend future repairs and builds to be funded—through yet more tax rises, more borrowing, bringing back PFI, or cutting other areas of spending?

Ultimately, these are decisions for Governments. To govern is to choose. This Government must own their choices, but sadly it is the public who will have to pay for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

This has been an interesting and enlightening debate in some ways. Of all the subjects on which the Liberal Democrats might have brought a motion to this House, it is fascinating that we are talking about new hospitals, as I think everybody would agree that the Labour party has invested both historically and under this Government in the national health service. In fact in the last Budget back in the autumn, £13.6 billion extra was allocated to NHS capital expenditure—a record amount. I know that Opposition Members have not particularly enjoyed repeated references to the coalition years. I do not think anybody in this House particularly enjoys remembering the 2010 to 2015 period. The Conservatives certainly do not, and apparently the Liberal Democrats—

[Luke Taylor]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Ferguson]

I am barely getting going but would be delighted to add an extra minute to my speech.

[Luke Taylor]

It is amazing how short memories are on the Labour side of the Chamber. The note from the right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne) which said “I am afraid there is no money” led to decisions that were apparently “ideological”, yet difficult decisions now being made by the Labour Government are “mature and realistic”. It is amazing how short the memories are to make those two things different. A lot of time and patience are being given to this Government for the delays to our hospitals; if their tone were more constructive, more patience would be given.

[Mark Ferguson]

If we want the tone to be constructive, we should be constructive about the fact that Labour is going to be building hospitals, when no hospitals were constructed over the last five years. The reality is very clear: hospitals do not simply appear; we cannot wish a hospital into existence. They require two things: money and time. If we wish that there were more new hospitals in this country, we should go back in time to 10 to 15 years ago. That would have been a fantastic time, when borrowing was much cheaper than it is today, to have invested in hospitals in all our communities. Unfortunately, the cancellation of the building schools for the future project was basically the first act of the coalition Government, and there was a lack of investment in schools and hospitals. As the shadow spokesperson the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) has said today, we are cleaning up the mess that has been left. That was the characterisation of the early 2010s, but it is very much more realistic today. The shadow spokesperson accused the Government of a lack of imagination. Well, there has been no lack of imagination here; there has been magical thinking from the Liberal Democrats, who apparently believe that a taskforce will generate the billions of pounds necessary to build hospitals immediately.

[Helen Morgan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Ferguson]

I am keen to make progress.

I have repeatedly made this point to Conservative Members, who I do not feel are taking the advice, but I will repeat it to the Liberal Democrats, who I equally do not think will do so. I have a huge amount of experience in opposition—a lot of us on the Government Benches have a lot more experience of it than we ever wanted. If we are really serious about what this country needs, we cannot just say that we want to have hospitals now and expect them to be delivered if we simultaneously oppose revenue-generating measures in the Budget. I am afraid that what this motion is about, which has been revealed by many of the speeches, is opportunism.

We all want more investment in the NHS and that is what this Government are delivering. A great point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) when he said that it is not simply a matter of buildings, but a matter of people too. The best maternity facility in the country is in my constituency at the Queen Elizabeth maternity hospital, yet it is in a very old building. I want a new building for that maternity hospital. I want far better resources for the staff. I hope that it will come in time, but they are doing a fantastic job with what we have got. We need to support those in the NHS rather than knocking them down.