My local hospital is crumbling, so why are we waiting?

Suburbia is not known for its towering landmarks, but St Helier Hospital is certainly one of them in my patch.

Sat atop a hill in the northernmost part of the constituency and surrounded by award-winning parkland, the great white building proudly presides over my local community. In a certain light, it has shades of Art Deco about it – a marker of when it was designed in the early 20th Century.

But it has seen better days.

The magnificent white paint is now peeling away. Standing adjacent to the main building are delipidated temporary buildings that have outstayed their welcome.

Inside, the ceiling leaks and the floors sink. It floods. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. Bits of tape and chunks of wood just about keep the whole thing from falling over. Put simply, my local hospital is crumbling.

This is not just a cosmetic problem. It has a real world impact every single day.

Modern day ventilation and spacing standards elude the Intensive Care Unit. Staff are forced to manage around new problems as they arise each day. Sometimes a lift breaks and it’s a scramble to move a patient to where they need to be. Other times entire wards have to close.

This all incurs a cost. There’s the human cost of patient experience and care. There’s the cost of staff time. And, of course, there’s the financial cost of the merry-go-round of patches, fixes and temporary measures.

The repairs and maintenance backlog at my local NHS trust now stands at around £150m. In the past five years, the trust has spent £60m on estate improvements. This is all just to stand still – and remember that where it currently stands is not a good place.

So, you can imagine the relief when the previous Conservative Government promised our local trust £500m for urgent upgrades to the main estate and a new building.

And you can imagine the disappointment when, after several years of “spades in the ground soon” claims, the slow realisation set in that those promises were hollow. A new Labour Government arrived, and we were told there was never any money set aside for the project.

Boris Johnson’s broken promise of “40 new hospitals”, of which St Helier was supposedly included within, was the most brazen but not the first time our community has been let down in this way.

A few years ago, when I was first selected to be the candidate for my seat, I had a meeting with former MP Tom Brake to discuss the hospital. I wanted to know every detail about what had been proposed over the years and how it played out. He told me of his first involvement in the hospital in 1990 – the year I was born.

Just imagine if the Government of the day had stumped up the cash over three decades ago. Whatever the cost would have been at the time, surely those debts would have been paid back several times over by now.

But we don’t have to imagine. We can broadly speaking work it out. Add up the current cost of maintaining a crumbling building, multiply it by the number of years you hope an upgraded estate will last for and you’ve got a good idea.

That’s why I simply don’t understand why we are still waiting for confirmation from the new Government. The argument goes that we need to work out what we can afford. However, a sensible capital investment strategy for a country should be assessing what we can afford over the long run.

We can’t afford not to invest in vital infrastructure for our NHS.

This is why I don’t believe the New Hospitals Programme is just a test of Labour’s commitment to fixing the NHS, it is also a test of their willingness to think differently on the public finances.

In the Budget there were some encouraging signs with the changes to the fiscal rules, which opens up the opportunity to borrow more for capital investment. Now it’s time for that investment to be allocated. Older than the NHS itself, St Helier Hospital has to be right at the front of the queue. It’s time to restore this local landmark to its former glory.