Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to allocate funding for a new hospital for Southport and Ormskirk NHS Trust.

Southport and Ormskirk NHS Trust was one of over 300 National Health Service schemes that applied for capital funding provided in the autumn Budget for Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) transformation schemes. The spring and autumn Budgets last year announced that additional capital funding will be made available to support NHS STPs in delivering improvements in their infrastructure to support transformation of services, support their ability to better meet demand for local services and drive efficiency improvements. Provisional funding for the first 37 successful schemes was announced in July and November 2017.

The Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust application was one that did not score sufficiently high against the criteria to be taken into the cohort to be considered for the next round of funding. NHS Improvement and NHS England informed the Trust via the Cheshire and Merseyside STP of the outcome in December 2017 and advised that where schemes can be strengthened these can be considered through the future opportunities for STPs to access future capital funding tranches. NHS Improvement has also worked with regional teams to enable systematic feedback to STPs on how their schemes might be strengthened.