Health Policy

Government agrees to bail out £335m Royal Liverpool Hospital after Carillion crisis

The government is set to bail out the £335m Royal Liverpool Hospital (RLH) after the collapse of Carillion earlier this year, following in the same footsteps as the stalled Birmingham hospital.

Sky News has reported that the government will announce in the next few days that it will terminate the RLH private finance initiative (PFI) deal and bring the hospital under public ownership.

After Carillion went into liquidation, it left the RLH in Liverpool and the £350m Midland Metropolitan Hospital in Birmingham with serious delays and concerns over whether they would ever be finished.

Last month, however, the government agreed to fund the remainder of the construction of the Birmingham hospital ahead of its 2022 opening.

The trust that runs RLH will hold a board meeting today and, because private-sector contracts relating to the hospital’s construction expire at the end of the month, a formal announcement is expected to be made by the weekend.

Sky also revealed that an engineering assessment carried out on the work already done by Carillion on the RLH “discovered major structural defects” and could incur substantial additional costs to the public purse.

Liverpool Walton MP Dan said during told Prime Minister’s Questions back in August that the hospital was now “a monument to corporate greed,” which echoes the findings of a scathing Commons committee inquiry from May.

MPs in the committee argued that the halted hospitals were a consequence of “rotten corporate culture” at the now-defunct Carillion company.

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