New Hospital Programme could be built over a ‘longer time frame’, government says

Labour will complete the previous government’s £20bn New Hospital Programme but it may be over a “longer time frame”, the health secretary has said.

Wes Streeting told the BBC he was “determined” to deliver the 40 new hospital schemes promised in the programme but first had to “make sure the money is there”.

The government announced in July that it would pause the programme white undertaking a “review”, the findings of which are expected to be published this autumn.

Streeting said the government would “have to do it over a longer period of time because I’ve got to make sure, firstly, the money is there, secondly that the timetables are realistic and we’ve got the supply chain, the labour and the resources that we will need, and thirdly I’ve got to balance the need for new bricks and mortar alongside the need for new technology”.

Keir Starmer insisted this morning that he is still committed to building the hospitals, which the previous government had promised to complete by 2030.

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The prime minister has also announced a 10-year plan to reform the NHS with three major goals, digitalisation, moving from hospital care to community care and a greater focus on preventative care.

The comments come despite this morning’s publication of a landmark report which found the NHS has been “chronically weakened” by a lack of capital investment over the past 15 years.

The review by Ara Darzi, a surgeon and former Labour health minister, found there was a £37bn gap in capital spending on the NHS between the UK and other countries during the course of the 2010s.

Darzi said this sum could have paid for the entire New Hospital Programme, rebuilt every GP practice in the country, modernised health technology or used to prevent the NHS’ £11.6bn maintenance backlog which resulted in services being disrupted at 13 hospitals a day in 2022-23.

>> See also: Conservatives handed over ‘fictional’ timeline for New Hospital Programme, says new government

The report found the NHS has been “starved of capital” with capital budgets “repeatedly raided” to cover day to day spending. Some £4.3 billion was taken from capital budgets between 2014-15 and 2018-19 to cover in-year deficits that Darzi said were themselves caused by unrealistically low spending settlements. 

He said he had been “shocked” by what he had uncovered during the investigation, describing the NHS as in a “critical condition” because of its long term lack of investment.

The 163-page report found the health service was unprepared for the pandemic, cancelling, delaying or postponing far more routine procedures than any other comparable health system.

Between 2019 and 2020, hip replacements in the UK fell by 46% compared to the OECD average of 13%, while knee replacements crashed by 68% compared to an average fall of 20%. 

Across the board, the number of discharges from UK hospitals fell by 18% between 2019 and 2020, the biggest drop across comparable countries. 

Meanwhile, the number of people waiting for more than a year for hospital procedures has increased 15-fold since 2010, from 20,000 to more than 300,000.