New Labour second thoughts on 1.2b hospital

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has defended her decision to order a review on whether a £1.2 billion redevelopment of London hospitals should go ahead.

Some 1,000 doctors at Bart's and the Royal London Hospital on Monday sent an open letter to Tony Blair urging him to give the go-ahead to the project, which they said was vital to the health of people in east London.

And Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has urged the Government to give the scheme the green light, warning that halting it now would waste £100 million in fees and compensation for broken contracts.

But Ms Hewitt said that the project - the largest healthcare development in Europe - had doubled in cost since it was first proposed four years ago, while waiting lists for cardiac care had plummeted.

She said she wanted to be sure that the cardiac and cancer facilities in the plan would represent value for money and would not duplicate facilities in other east London hospitals.

An independent review of the plans will be completed by the end of January, she said. The decision on whether to go ahead would be taken on both health and economic grounds.

Ms Hewitt told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "This is the largest ever Private Finance Initiative hospital building project.

"We are looking at a project which has already virtually doubled in its scale. Originally it was going to be around £600 million. We are now looking at about £1.2 billion, which means committing very large amounts of taxpayers' money for the next 30 years.

"Of course it is sensible, given that this proposal has now come to the Department of Health and the Treasury for final approval, for us just to double check that we are getting exactly what we need to meet the needs of Londoners and getting the best value for taxpayers' money.

"When Bart's and the Royal London began developing the proposal, waiting lists for heart operations in particular were very high. Since then, we have slashed the waiting times for heart operations. People can, in most cases, get their heart procedures within a couple of weeks, instead of waiting months as they used to. There has been that very significant change since this proposal started."

ED: Does Hewitt mean that the gov could not forsee that their attempts to reduce waiting lists would work? Or is the gov, once again, trying to misdirect the people. It would seem to be a case of uncontrolled spending starting to frighten even New Labour.