Our Sutton reporter, BELLE MONT, on the latest, devastating setback to NHS provision in this part of London
25 years of uncertainty and broken promises: St Helier Hospital has been ill-served by all three major political parties
Less than a month since being elected with a historically large majority, the recriminations are beginning to be heard around Keir Starmer – “Kid Starver’s” – Labour Government.
After suspending the Labour whip from seven MPs who backed a parliamentary amendment calling for an end to the two-child benefit cap, yesterday Chancellor Robotic Rachel Reeves announced a cut to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
In Sutton, the Labour Government’s announcement of a raft of more cuts and more austerity has set the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats at one another’s throats, as they bicker over the fate of St Helier Hospital, a crumbling pile of an NHS facility in which the staff work as best they can despite the decrepit state of the buildings.
St Helier Hospital stands as an outstanding example of how mismanagement of the NHS by Tories, LibDems and Labour have left all of us less well-served than we should be.
There have been plans, of one kind or another, for a new St Helier for a quarter of a century, none ever delivered. St Helier is one of the “40 new hospitals” promised by Boris Johnson’s Tory Government in 2019 that Reeves announced yesterday would now be “paused”, because there was never actually any money to pay for it.
There’s a hole in my budget: Rachel Reeves speaking to the Commons yesterday
It now seems unlikely that any of the schemes, possibly including St Helier, will be approved and funded before 2027.
The NHS Confederation, which represents the healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, warned: “In hospitals and other services where there are collapsing roofs, broken equipment and outdated facilities, with each day that passes without a longer-term fix, more funding is having to be used to provide short-term solutions to allow for the provision of patient care to continue.
“For the government to be able to deliver on their key pledge to drive down waiting lists and ensure the NHS is fit for the future, the pause to the delivery of the new hospitals programme must be as short as possible and NHS leaders need clarity about timelines.”
Still waiting: Dr Ruth Charlton has seen a series of broken promises over St Helier
St Helier’s main buildings pre-date the NHS. In May this year, Dr Ruth Charlton, the then chief medical officer of Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, wrote an article for the Grauniad in which she said, “We, our patients and our staff, cannot afford to wait any more. The longer these delays, the more money it costs us – and the more difficult it gets to keep our patients safe…
“Healthcare standards are getting higher while our hospitals are sliding into even more disrepair. When our lifts break down we can’t even get the parts to repair them because they are no longer manufactured.” Wards have to be closed when the lifts cannot carry patients to or from them.
“We are delivering safe care – but it’s not easy in such a dilapidated and unpleasant environment, and I fear we won’t be able to provide the level of care we’d like to – or should be – for much longer.”
Back in May, under the Sunak Conservative Government, there was still no go-ahead for the promised new hospital in Sutton. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no other option,” Dr Charlton wrote then. “We must progress our plans to build our new hospital and make improvements to our existing sites. Give us the go-ahead now.”
There looks to be little prospect of that wished-for funding being made available now.
Crumbling: at St Helier, they can’t even find replacement parts for their 1930s hospital lifts
Elliot Colburn, elected as a Conservative MP in 2019, served in Parliament for the whole period his various governments failed to give the green light to their version of the new hospital for Sutton (the Tories want a smaller hospital new build; others favour repurposing and rebuilding on the St Helier site).
Last night, he issued a social media message claiming that St Helier has been “betrayed by the LibDems and Labour”. Colburn has since deleted the message. Perhaps even he felt it was a tad too hypocritical, even for a Tory.
Colburn lost his Carshalton and Wallington seat in the General Election to Liberal Democrat Bobby Dean. In his message yesterday, Colburn blamed the LibDems for letting Labour “get away [with] it”, and calling them “shameful”.
Colburn wrote: “Local NHS staff have put so much work into this plan, getting it to the point that it could apply for planning permission and get building.
“Today, Labour and the LibDems have sent them back to Square One.”
Dean responded to Reeves’s announcement of a review of all the hospital schemes by promising to “fight for the investment we desperately need”, although there’s little, realistically, he might expect to achieve, given Labour’s juggernaut majority.
Lovely message: Sutton’s LibDem MPs issued similar-looking social media statements
Dean called the promised new hospital “a Conservative lie”.
His fellow LibDem newbie MP for Sutton and Cheam, Luke Taylor, took a similar line.
“Our Tory MPs were all writing cheques for our future NHS provision that had no chance of being cashed,” Taylor tweeted.
“This is an utter betrayal by the Tories. We cannot forget or forgive their failure.”
Dean said: “The Conservative promise to improve St Helier and build a new hospital was not worth the paper it was written on,” failing to mention that his predecessors as LibDem MPs in Sutton, Tom Brake and Paul Burstow, had worked in Tory-led governments on previous versions of the Sutton hospital plans.
Taylor and Dean issued similar, lovely little, orange-tinted statements on behalf of the austerity enabler party.
Dean says that he is “determined to fight for a new building at St Helier Hospital”, including retaining the under-threat A&E and maternity services, which have been under some kind of closure threat for at least six years.
He also said that he has a meeting with Labour’s health minister, Wes Streeting, in which he will “push for more details of the review and demand that a decision is made as urgently as possible”. Though whether one of 72 LibDem MPs is in a position to “demand” anything seems unlikely.
And what if the “decision is made as urgently as possible“, and it’s the decision that Dean doesn’t want? What will he do then? Stamp his foot a couple of times, and scream and scream…?
This could feel like a very loooong parliament.
Read more: Government cuts £100m from budget for new Sutton hospital
Read more: 13 MPs criticise move of maternity services from St Helier
Read more: Tories choose NHS’s birthday to sound death knell for St Helier
Read more: NHS set to announce A&E and Maternity closures at St Helier
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