NOT For the Many! Not Even For the Few!

Labour’s £500 millon PFI embarrassment hospital lies DESERTED and unused just a few miles from where Theresa May launched her 10-year spending plan for the NHS

A major row broke out in Labour-run Liverpool yesterday as Prime Minister Teresa May launched her national NHS funding plan from the hospital which serves Southport children. While Mrs May was outlining her NHS spending plans at the Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool, Labour MP Maria Eagle was wanting her to go to the white elephant site near the city centre instead.

For, only three miles from this ‘NHS launch’, Labour’s £500 million hospital, built under a Private Finance Initiative by failed company ‘Carillion’, lies empty and unused. The new 13-storey building which houses top-of-the range scanners and other medical equipment was meant to have been finished two years ago. But work ground to a halt last January following the failure of the botched Private Finance Initiative pushed through by the last Labour government.

The original cost of building the new hospital itself was meant to be around £335 million. The new hospital was meant to provide state-of-the art specialist facilities for rare and hard to treat conditions for patients from Southport to Chester.  A further £94 million was to be spent on demolishing the old building and landscaping it into new underground parking for patients plus plots for a new science park, bringing the final full cost to £429 million.

However, following the collapse of Carillion. the replacement hospital is now expected to cost a further £100 million and, although a new construction firm has been appointed, the Liverpool hospital is not likely to be finished until next year. Meanwhile, hospital managers in Liverpool are having to employ 18 staff to turn the 4,000 taps on and off regularly in a bid to prevent the build-up of deadly legionella bacteria – and warranties on a lot of the brand new equipment sitting idly doing nothing are rapidly expiring.

Southport patients still have to attend the ‘old’ Royal Liverpool Hospital, next door, where they face delays to their care because the existing building is falling apart. Half of the hospial’s lifts were rendered out of action during the floods making it difficult for staff to transfer patients to intensive care. Staff can’t even switch off the lights in the new building as the electrics are incomplete so hundreds of lights remain permanently on, day and night, in a complete waste of energy and money.

Liverpool’s Labour Mayor, Joe Anderson, said the new hospital could have been open already if ministers had heeded earlier warnings.

“I’ve seen how bad the existing Royal Liverpool Hospital building is, myself,” he said. “The last time I was there, water was leaking out of an air conditioning unit and they’d put a bin underneath to catch it.”  Joe Anderson says that if the Prime Minster had met him, he would have been asking for emergency funding for the existing hospital site. He says he had been warning ministers since before the collapse of Carillion that the project, a flagship’ of Labour’s NHS privatisation meaures, was in trouble. But it was only last September that the Department of Health finally stepped in to bail out construction of the new hospital.

The exact cost to the taxpayer of the new Royal Liverpool Hospital is unknown, as it has been part-funded funded by private firms and the EU.

Experts say the figure is at least £120 million – with a further £100 million needed to complete it. In addition, the NHS Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust are having to spend up to £1million a year maintaining the old building.

Aidan Kehoe, chief executive of the NHS Trust says that he is very angry with the situation. The system which Labour voted through in Liverpool permitted Carillion’s top managers to take huge bonus that they are not paying back even as the company was collapsing. and leaving the people of Mersryside waiting years more for a specialist hospital.