The new Labour Government has announced that it won’t proceed with plans by the previous Conservative Government to replace the Royal Berkshire Hospital – despite promises that they would.
During the General Election campaign, the newly elected MP for Earley and Woodley made a new hospital for our area the top priority for her campaign.
A new hospital was front and centre of her campaign leaflets. She criticised the Conservative Government for not progressing it fast enough, despite having a project team working on the project, and pledged on BBC Radio Berkshire that Labour would start building a new hospital in this Parliament if elected.
Now the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced that the hospital building programme put in place by the previous government is being put under review, and that includes plans for a new RBH.
As has quickly become standard for this new Government when they do things people don’t like, they’ve pointed the finger of blame at the Conservatives.
A statement from three of the local Labour claims without a hint of irony, “It is an outrage that the Conservatives promised new hospitals while covering up they had no money to pay for it.”
Yet this is precisely what Labour have done.
In Labour’s own policy document entitled Build an NHS Fit for the Future , published months before the general election, they said, “as a first step, before we commit to any more money, we’d make an assessment of all NHS capital projects”.
In May 2023, the Health Service Journal reported that Sir Keir Starmer would delay and review capital spending projects, like hospital building, under a Labour Government. In September that year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported on Labour’s commitment to the previous Government’s capital spending plans, at the same time as promising to spend £28 billion on ‘green’ investment – incidentally pointing out that £8 billion of that figure had already been planned by the Conservatives. The IFS concluded that Labour’s plans amounted to keeping capital investment flat in cash terms, with ‘additional’ spending going to green projects.
In other words, Labour never planned to allocate additional money to hospital building, and always intended to allocate the money to vaguely defined ‘green infrastructure’ projects.
This decision was made by Labour more than a year ago. And the IFS has already rubbished Labour’s claims of an unexpected black hole in public finances. Which begs the question why did Labour candidates make promises they could not keep? Had they read their own policy documents?
Meanwhile, the new Labour Government has apparently found money to scrap Conservative plans to reduce the numbers of civil servants to pre pandemic levels and to hand out significant pay increases to many public sector workers. Yet our new hospital apparently is not a priority.
Where does this leave us?
Locally we need a new hospital. In January just over 14,500 people attended A&E at the RBH. That was more people than last year and a staggering 2,500 more people than attended in January 2019. More space for triaging would mean better care for patients and fewer people admitted.
The current A&E department is cramped, and would benefit from a purpose built layout that allows for better triaging and improved working between departments.
A newly built hospital would also create opportunities for new deploying new technologies, including robotics and AI.
I have written to the new MP for Earley and Woodley to ask her to stand up to her party and keep her election promises.
We will continue to lobby the Government to reinstate the programme for a replacement to the RBH, and I urge the Liberal Democrat-run Council, and our local MPs, to join us.
Pauline Jorgensen is the leader of Wokingham Conservatives
