Councillors Clash Over Charing Cross Hospital Funding
Recriminations fly about responsibility for investment delays
Charing Cross Hospital
January 24, 2025
Tensions ran high at Hammersmith and Fulham Council last Wednesday night (22 January) as Labour and the Tories traded blows over the funding for Charing Cross Hospital.
A Conservative motion urging the council to call on the Government ‘to secure the future of Charing Cross Hospital’ was labelled a ‘hollow little shell’ by the Labour administration.
A lengthy amended motion was agreed, welcoming the Government’s £25 billion into the NHS, noting Charing Cross’s future is ‘secure’ and attacking the Conservative’s record on the hospital.
The funding and refurbishment of Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith has proven controversial for a number of years. NHS plans to demolish and sell off most of the site were axed in 2019 following a seven-year campaign.
Charing Cross was then included in the former Conservative Government’s New Hospital Programme (NHP).
The NHP, which featured in Boris Johnson’s 2019 election manifesto, promised 40 new hospitals by 2030.
The programme was hit by multiple delays and reconfigurations, with the National Audit Office warning in 2023 that the 2030 target was likely to be missed.
On Monday (20 January), Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced the original NHP was unaffordable in the short term and that funding would be released in waves.
Charing Cross was included in the fourth and final tranche, for which construction is not expected to begin until 2035 to 2038. A cost estimate for the works is listed as £1.5bn for both Charing Cross and Hammersmith.
At last night’s meeting, Cllr Andrew Dinsmore, Opposition Deputy Leader, criticised the Labour MP for Chelsea and Fulham and former councillor Ben Coleman’s election campaign promises regarding the refurbishment of the hospital and the commitment made by Mr Streeting to the NHP.
He said Mr Coleman, who recently stood down as a local councillor, should resign his seat in Parliament and call a by-election.
Cllr Dinsmore also criticised the Labour Government’s recent financial record, telling the chamber, “Rather than rebuilding the NHS, what the Labour Government has done in its first six months is remove the Winter Fuel Allowance, put VAT on school fees, tax working people with increased national insurance, cracking down on benefits, and giving bumper pay deals to their union paymasters.”
Cllr Amanda Lloyd-Harris, who seconded the motion, similarly attacked the Government’s decision to put the hospital rebuild into its fourth wave of funding.
“What is obvious is the Government is no friend of the NHS, the elderly, the sick, or those trying to make ends meet.”
Following the distribution of the amended motion, Labour councillor Jacolyn Daly directed her ire at the Tory benches.
“How dare you,” she said. “It’s 12 years since the Conservatives were in administration [locally] and colluded to sell off the land and reduce the number of beds there from 360 to 24. The plans to close our hospital were published, and they were widely reported.”
Cllr Daly further lambasted the former Tory Government’s commitment to the Charing Cross rebuild, describing it as a ‘hollow shell of a project’.
“Now we can see it was all lies. Not a single serious plan made. Not a penny put aside. The whole much-needed and anticipated second wave refurbishment [was] exposed as a shame, a hollow, empty vessel. You just can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.”
Council leader Stephen Cowan was also among those to speak, describing the majority of the speeches from the opposite benches as ‘some of the worst explanations of being a public representative who cares about the health service I think I’ve heard in my total time in the chamber’.
Cllr Cowan refuted the Conservative claims the former Government had plans for a floor-by-floor refurbishment of the hospital, describing it as ‘subterfuge’.
“Don’t give us the nonsense that somehow Charing Cross has been well looked after when you were custodians of our health service,” he said.
“Locally and nationally you’re not fit to get anywhere near our treasured National Health Service.”
Cllr Cowan added he is due to meet with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs Charing Cross, Mr Coleman and Hammersmith and Chiswick MP Andrew Slaughter to discuss how to support the facility.
Summing up, Cllr Dinsmore accused Labour of offering ‘not a single word of contrition nor apology’.
“You say now there is a plan, there is no plan. It’s to start after 2035. You can’t commit to spending after 2035 now. It’s a tier two hospital, it’s not even in the first tranche.”
He added, “There’s only so long you can continue to blame other people before you have to take responsibility for the decisions your government are now making, and residents deserve better.”
Imperial, which also runs Hammersmith and St Mary’s hospitals included in the NHP, has well-documented challenges across its estate.
BBC research last year found the Trust had the largest high-risk repair backlog in England. It sat at £393m for 2022/23, roughly 20 per cent of the national total.
Following Mr Streeting’s announcement earlier this week, Professor Tim Orchard, Chief Executive of Imperial, said, “We understand that the Government’s New Hospital Programme must be affordable but the simple truth is that St Mary’s Hospital, in particular, will not last until the 2040s.
“We run London’s busiest major trauma centre and care for more than a million patients a year. We need to digest the detail of today’s announcement, but we have to find a way to progress our schemes more quickly. This includes exploring alternative funding approaches, leveraging the value of our land that will be surplus to requirements and the significant contribution of our life science partnerships to local and national economic growth.”
Ben Lynch – Local Democracy Reporter