April is shaping up to be an important month when it comes to the long delayed – and much-derided – plan to build 40 new hospitals in the UK. The £22bn programme has been bogged down by bureaucratic inertia since former PM Boris Johnson first promised to build the facilities in the 2019 election campaign. But nearly five years later, months before Johnson’s successor Rishi Sunak faces his own electoral test, construction of the first of those hospitals is finally expected to complete, with the opening of the £50m Dyson Cancer Centre alongside the Royal United Hospital in Bath.

Even more significantly, Building understands that industry figures have been invited by the team running the New Hospital Programme (NHP) to attend briefings unveiling the long-awaited standardised hospital designs which the programme is supposed to roll out. Insiders expect procurement of a construction framework designed to deliver the buildings themselves to commence shortly after.

But despite this encouraging progress, huge questions remain over both the programme, and investment in the health estate more widely. Last year the National Audit Office found  the NHP had been subject to substantial delays, hadn’t offered value for money, won’t manage to complete 40 hospitals by 2030 and was subject to further serious risks of failure. The Department for Health and Social Care still hasn’t had its programme business case agreed by Treasury, amid reports officials have asked for £4bn more funding.

And while the NHP makes slow progress, the wider health estate continues to deteriorate, with the cost of backlog maintenance – the work on repairing leaky roofs and broken lifts that should already have happened – having risen to £11.6bn, according to the NHS’s own assessment. Adding to all these problems is the prospect of the political disruption likely caused by an election this autumn. In the second of Building’s pre-election updates, we examine what outlook this mixed picture spells for the industry.

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