St Helier Hospital - Sutton and Cheam Labour Party

Sutton Labour is Campaigning to Protect and Invest in St Helier Hospital

On July 29th 2024 the Chancellor announced a Review of the former Tory New Hospital Programme in order to ensure it was realistic, not the fictional programme of imaginary hospitals that Boris Johnson announced and the former Tory MP’s for this area kept defending when we said early on it was never going to happen. Further information was published here and in more detail here.

The Chancellor said the following:

In October 2020, the government announced that 40 new hospitals would be built by 2030.

Since then, the only hospitals only 6 have started their main construction activity which have been completed had been started before 2019.

And less than half of the 40 hospitals have even started construction.

The National Audit were clear that delivery was wildly off track.

But since coming into office, it has become clear that the previous government continued to maintain its commitment to 40 hospitals…

… without anywhere close to the funding required to deliver them.

That gave our constituents false hope.

We need to be straight with the British people about what is deliverable and what is affordable.

So we will conduct a complete reset of the New Hospitals Programme, with a thorough, realistic and costed timetable for delivery.

Labour in Sutton strongly welcomes this review by the Government because it will mean the white elephant Sutton Hospital project, which never had cross-party support and was estimated by the National Audit Office to cost between half a billion to a billion can be finally replaced with far more appropriate and cost-effective investment into St Helier and Epsom hospitals instead that better fits where local patients are actually concentrated. Instead of just carping about the issue as other parties will do, we also want to encourage a debate to look at alternatives and as a contribution to the debate even set out an early example of a proposal below that could be one that might be considered by the Review. We also welcome other cost-effective ideas from Merton and Epsom as well as from Sutton that could see St Helier and Epsom Hospital’s invested in.

Recent background from the Election and After

On 23rd July 2024, the new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting had also said the Labour Government would be reviewing the previous Government’s New Hospital Programme which has been described as fictional and unfunded. This further confirms the 2023 National Audit Office review of the programme which was highly critical – see more below.

On 13th June 2024 Labour launched its General Manifesto which can be viewed here and here. On page 96 it said the following:

It is also clear that NHS estates are in a state of disrepair after years of neglect. Labour is therefore committed to delivering the New Hospitals Programme.

This very clear statement rebutted the claim by the former Tory MP for Carshalton Wallington that Labour were only committed to investment in some hospital’s in London and not St Helier.

On 4th June 2024 Labour had made a broad commitment to rebuild Hillingdon Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Whipp’s Cross University Hospital and Charing Cross Hospital, Epsom Hospital and St Helier Hospital as part of its long-term plan to get the NHS fully back on its feet over the next 10 years.

This news was after it was revealed on 30th May 2024 by the Daily Mirror that the Boris Johnson broken promise of “40 New Hospitals”, which were supposed to be complete by 2030, were now timetabled by new procurement contracts to complete as late as 2035.

Despite this exposé of the Tories real plans to delay things, on the first day of the election campaign, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told BBC Breakfast “the majority” of the hospitals planned for construction had already received planning permission and that “spades were in the ground” and also said the hospitals would be built by 2030, however as the Daily Mirror article above shows that is completely untrue and the programme will extend to 2035 instead leading to a 5 year delay on the 2030 deadline which itself was a delay from the original plans when Boris Johnson first made up this mainly imaginary scheme.

Despite what the Prime Minister claimed we also know locally:

The current Tory proposals for a more than half billion plan for this area were announced in 2020 to remove St Helier and Epsom Hospitals’ A&E, Children’s and Maternity Services to the disused Sutton Hospital in Belmont and this was supposed to complete by 2027.
It is now 2024 and no planning application has ever been submitted for what would be a very complex proposal on a controversial site likely to take 2 years on planning applications and potential appeals alone. Even under the 2020 plans it is clear the earliest possible date for a new hospital would be 2031, thus illustrating the Prime Minister was not telling the truth about this. The National Audit Office report in 2023 estimated the current cost of a new hospital on the Sutton site would cost be in a 0.5 billion to 1.0 billion cost band. Labour has always said a far more cost effective approach would be to invest in St Helier and Epsom hospital sites which by less expensive and better value for money as well as continuing to be in the right place for both their respective catchment areas.
The National Audit Office Report of July 2023 had already revealed that over the previous 3 years little had been done to advance Cohort 3 of the Programme which the Sutton Hospital project is in. News coverage on the report flagged the high bed occupancy rate proposed would mean new hospitals could not cope with a future pandemic which would be a disaster in the making for a hospital proposed to be co-located on a Cancer hospital site full of immuno-suppressed patients as we warned in 2020. Another article on the report said: “The next government will inherit this unholy mess and several more years of neglect and depreciation.” . It went on to sum up the entire Programme so far:
- Boris Johnson et al were only interested in soundbites, grandstanding rhetoric and big but arbitrary numbers (just as they had been with pledges on more nurses or police officers or Covid-19 testing or PPE).
- There seemed to be no attempt to look at the real scale of the capital underinvestment and the amount of money needed to transform the NHS estate and equipment across acute, community and mental health care (and not just secondary care hospitals – which were pretty much the only sites chosen). There was no credible risk assessment or logistical plan or realism in the times scale.
- Worse than this utter incompetence in charge of a major public asset, they then blatantly misled the public about upgrades or add-ons to existing hospitals being “new builds” and mounting a comms operation to ensure that NHS leaders colluded in the big lie.
- They failed to deliver what they promised. And showed zero remorse for this or for the amount of futile work they had imposed on already overstretched NHS managers.

Labour in Sutton has welcomed the announcements by the Labour frontbench above and we set out below our encouragement of a far more realistic debate and even a potential early contribution to the review.

Alternative approaches to investing in St Helier Hospital

Reinvestment in St Helier hospital is long overdue. Patients had been let down by 14 years of Conservative neglect of the health service.

You will hear both the Conservatives and Lib Dem’s arguing we need to take action, but this is mainly words and little action.

The Conservatives already committed to this in 2019 and have made little to no progress on protecting St Helier and instead the A&E maternity and children’s units were threatened with downgrade and removal to another site.

The Conservatives have incompetently mismanaged this project. They had their chance over the last 5 years and 14 years in total and failed to get their own government to deliver its promise in that long period.

Labour has made a clear long-term commitment. St Helier was one of the 40 hospitals included in the New Hospitals Programme and Labour is committed to delivering a long-term programme. Government’s should always seek to over deliver on the promises they make, but in doing so they also have to be honest and realistic about the likely timeframe for delivery in the first place, which was never the case here between 2019 and 2024. In our 2022 Local Manifesto (extract below) we set out our preferred option for investment, but we are also realistic to realise after the last 4 year’s fiasco that public finances are not going to speedily deliver on that. We also think the public are realistic too in their expectations too and at this stage want to see a local hospital that functions well as waiting lists drop

The more than half billion spend proposed for the project was always ridiculous and quite clearly has made any improvement at all far less likely, so we all now need to look at alternative approaches. An early example might be a realistic phased approach which might be something more like this:

Phase 1 – an £80 million (based on past Trust investment reports that may need updating) early refurbishment of St Helier Hospital. A similar refurbishment should also happen at Epsom which does have more recent buildings so may require a lot less. This smaller sum would be far more easy for public representatives, local organisations and the public to lobby the government over.
Phase 2 – a £292 million (in today’s spend) version of a the unit proposed at Ferguson House on the St Helier site which actually had all-party support from 2010 when Patricia Hewitt agreed it to 2013 when the coalition (including the local Lib Dem MPs of the time) dropped it.

The idea here would then be to build wide local support for early implementation of a cost-effective Phase 1 with a longer term 10-15 year commitment to look at developing Phase 2 and beyond. This sort of phased approach spread over a far more honestly stated 10-15 years is far more realistic than a half to one billion imaginary hospital white elephant by 2027 we have been locally lumbered with and as a result nothing happening for four years. Thus we welcome a debate around this and other realistic options from both Merton and Epsom as well as Sutton.

As part of a longer 10-15 year approach there is also scope for a further longer term “Phase 3” bolder internal refurbishment of the main hospital building that also protects the external 1930’s art-deco façade and seeks Grade 2 listed building status for the external façade of what is actually one of the 20 most visible buildings in London and often described as an “ocean liner”. It’s a building, that people in Sutton, may, by St Helier Hospital’s centenary in 2038, come to proudly see as a historic part of the south London skyline visible for miles around.

We will continue to campaign to get St Helier hospital reinvested in, working with a Labour government to get this done as soon as is financially possible.

Only Labour can do what is needed to get UK finances in such a position to be able to reinvest in St Helier for the long-term.

Background Summary of of the Current Proposal and why it is wrong

The agreed plan in 2020 was the 3 services were to be provided at a new hospital in Belmont on the disused Sutton Hospital site next to the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital and Paul Scully MP and Elliot Colburn MP signed a letter supporting that.
The aim was to downgrade both St Helier and Epsom A&E and have a new A&E at the disused Sutton Hospital site next to Royal Marsden in Belmont.
Half a billion Pound project backed by both Tory MPs under Boris agreed in 2020 but Treasury sat on it so nothing has happened since
Labour have been consistently strongly against and say the focus will be an urgent need for investment in St Helier.
The Lib Dem’s claim to want to save St Helier but is it not what they say that matters but what they do. They controlling Sutton Council have set up land arrangements on the old Sutton Hospital site which the Council now owns the majority of that in effect help the move of the A&E to that site and would also see a big access road bulldozed across the Belmont allotment site.

Detailed Explanation of the Labour Current Position Above

Labour welcomes a Labour Government Commitment to developing a New Hospitals Programme that has a realistic programme that does not disappoint people for more than half a decade with no action taken.
That Original programme for this area is 4 years old and was mainly consulted on before Covid changed things so it is clear the past detail would need to be reviewed in any case. Indeed all the glossy atrium drawings of the proposed new hospital were already out of date as the 2023 review of the Programme agreed to Cohort 3 of the Programme to be “flatpack” modular buildings which is still a not fully tried out proposal so the new one was to be a risky guinea-pig too not what was sold to local people in 2020.
Labour’s long-term commitment above enables a new proposal to be made whereby investment is made to both St Helier and Epsom hospitals themselves. This would cost less than the original half a billion Pound project but more crucially would be quicker too as an achievable outcome could be defined on an existing site and the public could then far more easily judge if the commitment had been delivered.
Instead of a more than half billion programme that has so far been stuck for 4 years a far quicker and more efficient approach would be to spend something like half that cost in this decade on investing on St Helier and Epsom Hospitals rather than a clearly failed project that would not happen by 2031 and more likely by 2035 based on the current planning and procurement processes which will take some time to improve after the state they were left by the Tories.
Our broad approach would take us back to something more like the proposal for investment in St Helier adopted by the Labour Government in 2010 which was endorsed by the new coalition government at the time and for 3 years secured all-party consensus too
Thus Labour’s approach seeks to ensure urgent action, be efficient and good for the taxpayer and offers the opportunity to secure long-term all-party agreement for a proposal all sides should be happy with just as they were more than a decade ago.

History of the existing proposal that is already four years late

St Helier Hospital’s A&E, Maternity, Children’s Hospital Care and all Emergency Care, have since 2020 been under serious threat of removal to Belmont as part of a NHS South West London proposal backed by the then Tory MPs in Sutton.

Over the last 4 years this has been the biggest threat to our hospital it has faced as unlike the previous three attempts there has been a Tory majority in Parliament to see these service cuts through replacing services at St Helier and Epsom with a much smaller out of the way Belmont unit. Having made a proposal they held a consultation and, despite that inevitably not coming to a consensus for such a large area, when the two current hospitals are already in the right place for their communities, have decided to proceed with the proposals.

Sutton Labour’s submission to the consultation is here. Merton Council asked for the Secretary of State for Health to call in the proposal for an Independent Review which you can read here. That Review was of limited duration and the Secretary of State upheld the proposals. However it has been noticeable over 4 years that the money had not been provided and in April 2022 the Evening Standard reported the funding had been delayed which at the time we said would push the proposals back to 2029 instead of the planned 2027 completion date. This lead to speculation as to whether the Treasury was seeking big land disposals at St Helier and Epsom Hospitals to fund the scheme. This would require Sutton Liberal Democrats on Sutton Council to go along with the proposals over planning de-designation despite their claims that they oppose the proposals.

As part of our campaign in the autumn of 2020 against the proposals, during the Covid pandemic, we organised appropriately physically distanced car convoy protests in Sutton and Epsom calling on the local Councils to refer the decision to the Secretary of State for Health for an Independent Review. See the photos below.

As well as the events themselves we were covered in the media by Radio Jackie. This involved a flatbed truck with a hospital bed and “patient” leading the car convoy, more than 15 cars in a convoy that travelled to St Helier Hospital and then around the Civic Offices 3 times and over 100 protesters in cars or at the Civic Offices or at Epsom hospital. We had 5 local Labour Parties present from 4 boroughs as well as members of GMB and Unison, and a number of Merton Councillors. In Sutton the Council Chief Executive came out to see what we were up to and we were able to pretty loudly convey our “referral message”, so we could absolutely confirm the Council got the message! Here is the moment the car convoy and the Civic Offices Protesters met up

As part of the campaign to defend our services, the GMB trade union held a number of public meetings across the area which are backed by the local Trades Council, local Labour Parties and their “Hands off our Hospitals” campaign – see more on Facebook here.

More on the GMB support for the local campaign is on their Southern Region GMB website here.

Further Actions by Labour to defend St Helier and Epsom Hospitals

We have supported various campaigns, including those by Keep Our St Helier Hospital (KoSHH), to flag up the threat of land sales at Epsom Hospital
We exposed the Trust’s use of Saville’s Estate Agent’s to try to change the health planning status of the St Helier site
We have written to the Trust about the threat of building high density housing on the site and forced the withdrawal of that suggestion from the Hospital Trust strategy documents.
We have sought clarification from the Council over the ownership status of the land at St Helier Hospital car park. The front part is owned by the Trust with the Council holding restrictive covenants over it. The back part is owned by Sutton Council and leased to the Trust on a 30 year lease until 2025. The rest of the site is owned by Sutton Council and leased to the Trust for 999 years.

Our 2022 Manifesto Policy

We celebrate that St Helier Hospital is one of the safest in the country and one of the few trusts in the country that consistently delivers the four-hour A&E target and is among the best in London.
We support a local health strategy that includes a full Acute Hospital service with A&E and maternity at the current St Helier Hospital site. In 2009 after years of Labour campaigning the last Labour Government agreed to £219 million for a partial rebuild of a new acute unit on the Ferguson House part of the hospital. This money was taken away from local people by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition in 2013.
We oppose the Epsom and St Helier Trust’s inadequate engagement exercise which seems mainly aimed at convincing their own staff and Epsom consultants to accept a small and inadequate acute unit on the Sutton Hospital site. We also strongly oppose the Trust’s secret agenda, which Labour is exposing, for the sale of parts of the St Helier site for housing purposes. We reserve the right to demand a referendum to ask residents to vote to keep the current full NHS health use of the St Helier site. This would create a “Residents’ Lock” on the site in future so its status can only be changed by another residents’ referendum.
In order to move things forward now and set the agenda, we would fully engage local people on the three real options for our local hospital’s future. A full rebuild would cost £750 million, a part rebuild like the 2009 proposal would cost £350 million and a more short-term refurbishment would cost £80 million. Labour’s preference is for a £750 million rebuild with all the 1930’s external facade protected and the hospital then made a Grade 2 listed building. We will engage with local people and, if we secure strong public support for that proposal, will demand resources from central government to fund it. The best option would be for the government to fund the rebuild and the loan made at a low rate of interest.
We continue to support the provision of Children’s Hospital Services at Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children on the St Helier site. Labour, health campaigners and trade unions locally fought hard to keep a local Children’s hospital with a big demonstration and march in Sutton in the mid 1990’s. We will continue to fight for that service to stay where it is now.
We continue to recognise the importance of Epsom Hospital which is used by around 10% of Sutton residents. We want to see it retain its acute services too.
We will do all we can to defend our local hospital if the Trust continues with its Sutton Hospital acute proposal. We will launch a much bigger campaign for this. We will have banners on our dustcarts and at the Civic Offices as Labour Merton has done. We will demand the Council uses all its scrutiny powers to slow down the process & support a judicial review to protect local services.
We will press the hospital trusts to abolish parking charges to reduce the impact on local residents in surrounding roads.

More on our local policies on Health and Social Care and our local Manifesto can be read here.