New Hospital Programme (England): Plan for implementation (January 2025)

Following the 2024 General Election, the Government undertook a review of the New Hospital Programme (NHP) previously announced in October 2020. The review fed into the Spending Review process for the Autumn 2024 Budget. The Government has committed to deliver all schemes that have previously been included as part of the NHP.

A table of the schemes and expected construction commencement dates is set out below.

RAAC

The seven hospitals constructed primarily using reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) will continue to be prioritised in the programme to address the highest risk elements as early as possible. The Secretary of State has also commissioned an updated site-by-site report of the RAAC hospitals to better understand the impact of the substantial mitigation work that has taken place since May 2023 and to inform decisions in the delivery of the replacement hospitals. The report and findings are due in Summer 2025.

Standardisation

The NHP takes a standardised approach to:

• leverage economies of scale
• standardise hospital designs
• improve productivity
• ensure value for money
• support delivery

The standardised approach is also intended to support engagement with the construction market. The programme’s approach to standardisation, known as ‘Hospital 2.0’, has been designed with clinical and operating staff and aims to speed up construction, decrease the overall time for hospitals to be built and result in facilities that maximise modern technologies. The standard approach allows for lessons to be learnt iteratively as schemes complete within the programme, creating a repository of knowledge for future projects.

Key to this approach is offering certainty to the construction industry. Construction companies will not be signing up for one hospital scheme but several hospitals in a rolling programme.

Capital funding

Although £3.1 billion additional capital investment was allocated at the Budget 2024, commentators have identified that this is still at least £3.3 billion short of the £6.4 billion a year additional capital investment needed to help boost NHS productivity growth to 2 per cent per year. This has been exacerbated by successive governments raiding capital budgets to prop up day to day revenue spending.

In a report, Capital efficiency: how to reform healthcare capital spending, (February 2025) the NHS Confederation has stated inter alia that the integrated care systems (ICS) should be enabled to raise private investment to meet the two per cent annual productivity challenge set out in NHS England’s long-term workforce plan, recommending to HM Treasury, DHSC and NHS England:

• a change to national policy and guidance to allow new routes for private investment (such as Mutual Investment Models), and
• support to attract investment through policy stability and a steady pipeline of projects.

Although the Treasury has opposed reviving private investment in recent years, Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive, NHS England told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (13th February 2025), ”The government have given more capital to the NHS this year, which is hugely welcome, but in the current financial context we can’t keep asking the government for more state funding. We are not going to fill the gap that way.” She added that the health service needed to think “much more radically” abound capital to improve the healthcare estate due to pressures on public finances.

Further details: www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-hospital-programme-review-outcome/new-hospital-programme-plan-for-implementation.