Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the next cohort of pathfinder hospitals as part of the New Hospital Programme will be built.

The Department and NHS England’s joint New Hospital Programme was provided with an initial £3.7 billion over the first four years of the programme to support the delivery of 40 hospitals by 2030. As this is an infrastructure project which will span a 10-year period, progress on the new hospitals will continue up until 2030.

Cohort 3 is the first of the larger and more complex schemes. We are working with trusts to determine how elements of standardisation will be incorporated to deliver more efficient design and delivery. This will inform the next steps for progressing anticipated construction timescales. Cohort 4 are full adopters in the programme, benefiting from a centralised approach, standardised designs and modern methods of construction. We expect schemes in cohort 4 to be delivered in the latter half of the decade. Individual funding allocations for all schemes will be determined once a Full Business Case has been reviewed and agreed. Currently five of the 40 hospital schemes are under construction. We are expecting that another 10 schemes will start construction before end of 2024.