New hospital engagement activity scrapped

A major engagement exercise to get the public’s thoughts on the proposed sites for new hospitals in Preston and Lancaster has been indefinitely postponed after the projects were pushed back to the late 2030s.

A survey and series of drop-in events were launched just last week, the first opportunity residents have had to have their say on where the long-promised facilities are built.

However, on Monday, the government announced the schemes had been placed in the final wave of the nationwide New Hospital Programme – meaning building work will not begin on either of them until the second half of the next decade.

Both the new Royal Preston Hospital and Royal Lancaster Infirmary had been expected to be open by that point under the previous timetable for the work.  But now construction in Preston will not begin until between 2037 and 2039, while the window for Lancaster has been set at 2035-2038.

The NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria says the “significant delay” means it has had to make “the difficult decision to suspend public engagement on the proposed sites”.

“The planned programme of public events and independent market research will be cancelled until further notice,” the health service said in a statement.

Nine public sessions had been planned across the patch during February and March. Meanwhile, the survey will now be shut down on 27th January – months earlier than planned – although a commitment has been made to analysing the responses received so far, for which local health leaders have thanked residents and hospital staff.

When the government’s decision was announced earlier this week, the Lancashire engagement exercise was still being actively promoted, but reports have since emerged that hospital projects whose start dates now lie beyond 2030 could have to disband the teams working on them. The Health Service Journal says government funding for the staff dedicated to delivering the facilities will be withdrawn.

Hospital bosses have acknowledged that this week’s news will dismay residents, who were being asked for their opinions on proposed sites for a new Royal Preston in the Farington area of South Ribble and a replacement Royal Lancaster at Bailrigg East.

Professor Silas Nicholls, chief executive of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – which runs the Royal Preston – said:   “Although people will be understandably disappointed about the delayed plans for a new Royal Preston Hospital, we welcome the government’s commitment to delivering the hospital albeit over a more sustainable timeframe.

“We will continue to work closely with all our partners and stakeholders to ensure that the need for new facilities remains high on everybody’s agenda so that our communities can continue to access high quality and specialist care in an environment that truly suits their needs.”

Meanwhile, Aaron Cummins, chief executive of University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust – operator of the Royal Lancaster – added:  “Any delay to the delivery of a replacement new hospital for the Royal Lancaster Infirmary is disappointing, but we accept the need for a fully costed and deliverable timeline of investment through the New Hospital Programme.

“Whilst this may not be the news local communities wanted, we hope that the outcome brings some certainty that patients and NHS colleagues will get the new hospital that they deserve. Getting feedback from patients, NHS staff and the public will be just as important in that process – and we will be asking for everyone’s views on our proposals again at an appropriate time.”

“New hospitals are just part of the picture for health services. The NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria will continue to deliver improvements in health and care across the region, including how we work together with hospitals, community and primary care, and local authorities to reconfigure our services so that they deliver the best possible outcomes for our population.

Just 24 hours after news broke of the delay, Chorley MP Sir Lindsay Hoyle was making the case that Lancashire would be well-placed to see its new hospital schemes brought forward sooner than the revised timetable suggested.   He said the county’s programme was already well advanced and so could take advantage of any slippage in schedules elsewhere in the country that might enable it to move up the queue.

However, the pausing of the engagement process – and the formal public consultation that would have to follow before a final decision could be taken over the sites – along with any withdrawal of funding for the local team overseeing the projects now seems to bind Lancashire firmly to the late 2030s timeframe set out by the government.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said in the Commons on Monday that all of the promised new hospitals across the country now had “an honest, realistic, deliverable timetable that [people] can believe in”.

New hospital facilities for Central and North Lancashire were first promised by the then Boris Johnson government in October 2020 – with the possibility of either new buildings for both Preston and Lancaster or a single one serving the two areas. Two years later, the NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria opted to bid for funding for new hospitals in both cities. The region was told by the Rishi Sunak government in the summer of 2023 that it had been successful – but that building work would not begin on the projects until the turn of the 2030s.

How did the government decide which new hospitals to prioritise?   

The previous Conservative government had already lengthened the original timetable for delivery of the new Preston and Lancaster hospital schemes, along with several others, so that it could give priority to the replacement of hospitals affected by defective so-called ‘crumbling concrete’ – or RAAC.

In May 2023, it was announced the Lancashire projects would not see shovels in the ground until after 2030, but the expectation amongst local NHS leaders was the facilities would be ready to open by the middle of the decade.

A review of the nationwide New Hospital Programme was announced when the new Labour administration came to power last summer and said the schemes were “not deliverable” on the schedule promised by the Tories. It is the outcome of that review that has resulted in the Preston and Lancaster projects being further delayed until the mid-late 2030s

The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) has released details of how it prioritised schemes within the revised schedule, revealing that the Royal Preston and Royal Lancaster were amongst the nine post-2030 builds assessed to determine whether whether they were “sufficiently high risk” to merit being brought forward into the first wave of construction between 2025 and 2030.

Not only were the Lancashire schemes not deemed urgent enough to be accelerated, they were shifted even further down the line to the back end of the next decade.  That was in spite of assessments by the NHS in Lancashire in South Cumbria – which had successfully been used to make the case for funding the new hospitals in 2021 – showing maintenance backlogs of £157m on the current Royal Preston in Fulwood and £88m on the ageing Royal Lancaster Infirmary.

It is not yet clear how the repair regimes at the two facilities will now be modified in view of the delay to the delivery of their replacements.

The DHSC used a special decision-making tool to analyse various criteria in order to come up with the new priority hospital-building list, which put Preston as the joint-lowest of the projects to be carried out nationwide, with a construction start date that is now 12 years away.

Amongst the issues considered were the impact of the condition of the current estates on services and the deliverability of the replacement buildings.