Hospitals

Rebecca Paul Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

I am grateful for the chance to speak in today’s debate and to be able to give voice to so many of my constituents’ frustrations about how their right to access quality healthcare has been deprioritised by this Labour Government.

Many of my constituents, especially those in the north of my constituency, are served by the Epsom and St Helier university hospitals NHS trust. To be blunt, the situation at the trust today is simply not sustainable—clinically, financially or structurally. The trust currently operates two acute hospitals, in Epsom and St Helier, with duplicate services spread across both sites. The arrangement, while a product of historical necessity, today places considerable pressure on clinical teams. Allocation of staff members between sites is challenging and service delivery is stretched. No matter how committed the staff—their dedication is beyond question—they are constantly being asked to do more with less, in buildings that are often quite literally falling apart around them.

To give just one brief example, earlier this year St Helier was forced to cancel scheduled blood tests because of widespread flooding in the phlebotomy section. We simply cannot go on like this. Indeed, time is not a luxury we have, with the estate now deteriorating faster than it can be fixed. The trust is spending millions every year simply to keep the most urgent problems at bay: patching leaks, coping with flooding, and addressing the worst outbreaks of damp and mould. I think we all agree that these are not the conditions in which 21st-century healthcare should be delivered.

That is why it was so disappointing to learn earlier this year that the planned specialist emergency care hospital in Sutton—a long-standing scheme under the new hospital programme that was carefully conceived to address the very issues I have mentioned—has been delayed to the point that work will now not even begin until 2030 to 2035, with opening coming in 2037 at the earliest.

The new hospital will consolidate emergency care into one state-of-the-art facility, delivering world-class treatment, faster access to care, and safer outcomes. At the same time, it will allow for major investment at Epsom and St Helier hospitals, helping to modernise crumbling buildings, improve planned care pathways and ensure that most services remain close to home. Under the trust’s plans, 85% of services would remain on the Epsom and St Helier sites, including out-patient care and diagnostic appointments. Local people would continue to receive the vast majority of their care where they always have done, but would benefit from shorter waiting times and access to better facilities, particularly for surgery. I passionately believe that the new hospital at Sutton is a once- in-a-generation chance to overhaul healthcare provision and ensure that my constituents receive the high-quality care they deserve in a timely fashion.

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

The new Sutton hospital will sit in my constituency. In 2020, we were promised by the former Member for Sutton and Cheam that the hospital would open in 2025; indeed, he continues to have that claim on his website. Does the hon. Lady agree that the failure to deliver any new hospital in Sutton borough, whether at Belmont or St Helier, is entirely down to the failure of the previous Government to fund and bring forward these projects while they were in power?

[Rebecca Paul]

I can confirm to the hon. Member that if the Conservatives were in power, we would be delivering that hospital.

I want to be clear: the trust is ready to move forward, and clinical consensus has been secured; what is now urgently needed is commitment from the Government to drive the programme forward. After all, patients and staff alike deserve better than to spend another decade or more in facilities that are not fit for modern healthcare delivery. They deserve to know that promises made through the new hospital programme will be honoured, not quietly shelved or endlessly deferred by this Government.

I urge Ministers in the strongest possible terms to look again at the decision to delay Sutton emergency care hospital and to provide the long-term certainty the trust needs to proceed—not in 2035, but now.