3.5m Wasted on Studies for Hospital That Will Not Be Built

By KATHARINE BARNEY

MILLIONS of pounds have been wasted on plans for a hospital which will never be built.

Sutton residents had been promised a 350 million hospital to replace St Helier Hospital.

It was planned that the hospital would be knocked down, nearby Sutton hospital either knocked down or downgraded, and a new building erected on one of the sites.

Feasibility studies were commissioned costing 300,000 every three months for about three years. But now the NHS programme Better Healthcare

Closer to Home (BHCH) has announced that the NHS cannot afford to go ahead with the plans.

Instead, parts of St Helier Hospital will be upgraded and a new ward block will be built.

A letter addressed to local MPs and council leaders, seen by the Standard, said: “A new built hospital on either the Sutton or St Helier sites now looks to be unaffordable under the NHS capital regime. The margin of unaffordability is such that there is no prospect of bridging the gap.” It is the latest blow to the services of the cash-strapped Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, which has to make 24 million over two years to balance its books.

Health chiefs have been criticised for a range of cost-cutting methods, some as dramatic as removing light bulbs, It was recently revealed that the trust is also downgrading maternity services in the area.

Controversy also surrounded the plans when former health secretary Patricia Hewitt vetoed

Sutton and Merton primary care trust’s decision to build on the Sutton site.

Epsom’s MP Chris Grayling said: “They have ended up with the worst of all possible worlds for Epsom.

“They should not move any services from Epsom until they know what is happening right across the area.” Councillor Stuart Gordon- Bullock, chairman of Sutton health scrutiny committee, said: “All this money has been wasted. It should have been spent on patients but has been spent on civil servants. They’re just going to try and paper over the cracks with a cobbled-together service.

But BHCH defended the decision and said it was doing what it could with the budget available.

There are 1.45m plans to upgrade women and children’s services, develop a care centre on site and look at the option of developing an in-patient mental health facility, on the site.

Mark Easton, BHCH programme director, said: “We are moving forward as quickly as we can on the elements of the programme that we can progress.”

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