Health Services: Infrastructure
(asked on 12th January 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the relative costs of (a) publicly funding health infrastructure and (b) health infrastructure funded through Public Private Partnerships.
The Government has committed significant public capital funding to health infrastructure, with the overall annual capital budget increasing to £15.2 billion by the end of the Spending Review period for 2029/30. Over the five-year Spending Review period, this translates to £30 billion in day-to-day maintenance and repair of the National Health Service estate and over £6 billion of additional capital invested in diagnostic, elective, and urgent and emergency capacity in the NHS. In addition, we remain committed to delivering all schemes within the New Hospital Programme, which will continue through the Spending Review period, rising to a steady rate of £15 billion over five-year cycles.
The 2025 Budget announced that the NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild Programme will deliver new neighbourhood health centres through upgrading and repurposing existing buildings and building new facilities through a combination of public sector investment and a new model of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Delivering new neighbourhood health centres through a combination of public investment and PPP will also allow the Government, for the first time, to build further evidence and compare different delivery models.
The Department and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority are continuing to develop the new PPP model for neighbourhood health centres with further engagement this year. The new neighbourhood health centres PPP model will build on lessons from the past including the National Audit Office’s 2025 report on private finance and other models currently in use. Further information on the National Audit Office’s 2025 report on private finance is avaiable at the following link:
To ensure fiscal transparency and sustainability, the Government will budget for these neighbourhood health centres as if they were on-balance sheet, to ensure that this expenditure is transparent, and fiscally sustainable.