Go-ahead given for hospital rebuild backed by PM

The hospital, which is also part of a £500m project by Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust, will be built in the London borough of Sutton after the independent reconfiguration panel was asked to review the plans.

This will see six core services moved to the new site in Belmont while the existing hospitals, Epsom and St Helier respectively, will retain the rest. The services being moved are major accident and emergency, acute medicine, critical care, emergency services, births and inpatient paediatrics or children’s beds.

The trust said it hoped builders will be on site in spring 2022 and that the new hospital would open in 2025 — a year after the latest possible date of the next general election.

ESHUHT chief executive Daniel Elkeles said: “We welcome the advice from the IRP and are delighted the health secretary has agreed that we should proceed with investing £500m in a new hospital at Sutton, and in Epsom and St Helier hospitals.

“We are now proceeding at full speed to design the new hospitals and will soon be engaging with our local communities on the new hospital facilities.”

It comes after ESHUHT was selected as part of the first wave of a £3bn hospital building programme announced by Boris Johnson last summer. It will see six trusts share a £2.7bn pot to start their rebuilds up until 2025, with another 21 getting “seed funding” to develop future schemes between 2025 and 2030.

Local leaders at South West London and Surrey Heartlands clinical commissioning groups voted on its new location in July before Mr Hancock was urged to call the decision in.

The decision was referred to the IRP last month, which has now concluded the proposals should proceed.