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South Ribble MP Paul Foster insists “nothing has changed” regarding plans for a new Royal Preston Hospital – in spite of a review being ordered into the nationwide hospital-building programme of which it is a part.
The newly-elected Labour MP was speaking after the Chancellor’s public spending statement earlier this week in which the Treasury confirmed “a full and comprehensive” assessment of the previous Conservative government’s ‘40 new hospitals’ pledge would be undertaken.
The review had already been announced last week by health and social care secretary Wes Streeting who said the raft of new facilities were “not deliverable” by 2030 – the point at which the majority of them were supposed to have opened.
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However, the new Royal Preston – which former South Ribble MP Katherine Fletcher said last year had been earmarked for a site somewhere in her then constituency – had already been pushed back into a later phase of the programme and is not due to be completed until the early-mid 2030s – leading to hopes that it might be unaffected by the review.
But the context of the Chancellor’s statement – a “£22bn hole” in the nation’s finances – suggested that there could be instances in which some new hospitals were going to prove financially, as well as logistically, impossible to deliver.
Yet Paul Foster says residents should not regard the review as a reason for “doom and gloom”.
“The Chancellor has just said nothing had been funded – and it’s a statement of fact.
“The challenge we have in Central Lancashire is [that] our new hospital…was proclaimed as [having] been secured by [former South Ribble MP] Katherine Fletcher and even the former health secretary, Victoria Atkins, said it as well.
“But people have just been given slightly false hope because there was a general election. This is exactly what we were trying to say during the campaign.
“[All that] has changed is that the new government has been honest with the constituents of South Ribble and Preston in that this hospital had never been approved and it had never received its funding.
“New builds are obviously what we’re all championing and we’re all pushing for, desperately – but we’ve got a process we need to go through,” Mr. Foster added.
It emerged in May 2023 that Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS bosses had secured their favoured option of two entirely new hospitals for both Preston and Lancaster on sites somewhere within a ten-mile radius of where the current facilities stand.
The Conservative then health secretary Steve Barclay said in the Commons that all of the previously-announced new hospital projects would proceed – but he identified the Lancashire proposals as one of eight whose completion date would be pushed back beyond the end of this decade.
As the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has previously revealed, preferred sites for each of the new Preston and Lancaster hospitals were selected last year, but have not been publicly revealed.
It is understood that the necessary business cases are progressing through both local and national approvals processes. In the Commons last week, Wes Streeting confirmed that there was “a scheme that will be put to me shortly”, which he said he would consider “carefully”.
The LDRS understands that whilst preferred sites have been identified, they would be subject to public consultation – and the NHS remains open to the possibility of alternative sites coming forward.
In a thread on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, earlier this week, the Tory now shadow health and social care secretary Victoria Atkins took issue with Labour’s claims over the review the new government has set in motion.
“Labour says their plan to cancel or pause the Conservatives’ New Hospital Programme is needed due to new information since they took office. But the truth is Labour have been planning these cuts for a long time,” Ms. Atkins wrote.
“In May 2023, Labour announced that they would review NHS capital funding ‘as a first step’ in government. They have stuck to that promise. I challenged Wes Streeting about it in the Commons on 23[rd] May 2024– with no denial or equivocation.
“During the campaign, however, Labour realised that local communities did not like this. So, some Labour candidates- including @Keir_Starmer – claimed the plans for new hospitals and other NHS building projects would be safe with Labour. Their first u-turn on new hospitals.
“On Monday, Labour u-u-turned back to their original ‘No New Hospital Programme’. This is their choice, no one else’s.“
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