Cash row over 'super hospital'

A row has broken out over the soaring cost of London's first "super hospital".

The complex - which would house a merged St Mary's in Paddington, Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals - is designed to create a world-beating healthcare, teaching and research centre.

But the Paddington Health Campus is set to cost £1 billion to build - more than three times its original estimate and £200 million more than the Millennium Dome.

Critics have branded the project unworkable and called on health chiefs to return to the drawing board.

They fear NHS money is being ploughed into a white elephant which is draining vital resources from other hospitals in the capital.

The Paddington campus is to be built using the private finance initiative (PFI), whereby commercial concerns and not the Government run major facilities.

In return for saving the taxpayer huge, one-off building costs, the Government rents the finished building and pays an annual management fee to the private company.

The cost of the campus was originally £360million but, when it was discovered that the planned wards were too small, the scheme had to be redesigned.

That brought it up to £800 million, which is set to increase by another £200million because planners have insisted much of it should be built on expensive land in the Paddington Basin area.

The rising cost of the project will be seized upon by critics of the PFI scheme, who argue they are driven by firms wanting to make profits rather than meet the needs of the NHS.

The scheme suffered another blow today when key staff at the Brompton and Harefield hospitals, which will close if the new campus is completed by 2007 as planned, said they will not relocate.

Workers at both hospitals - including surg eons, nurses and administrative staff - were polled by the Institute for Employment Studies, which is regularly used for NHS surveys. Nearly 46 per cent of respondents said they did not intend to move - with 64 per cent of staff at Harefield, famous for Sir Magdi Yacoub's heart transplant unit, voicing objections.

Across both hospitals, 50 per cent of qualified nurses, 27 per cent of medical and dental staff and 23 per cent of senior management said they would not move to Paddington.

Jean Brett, chair of the Heart of Harefield campaign to keep the hospital open, said: "The Paddington project has been a complete disaster. The plans are not only unaffordable but undesirable and, staff just do not want to move.

"You cannot blame people who are used to working in an English village for not wanting to work in the congested, polluted Paddington Basin."

According to the survey, fewer than 20 per cent of employees at Harefield and the Brompton would be happy to work at the new site.

While 24 per cent of staff at the Royal Brompton, which is only a few miles from the new site, say they will accept the move, staff at the Harefield (16 miles outside London) are deeply reluctant to relocate.

The results raise the possibility of a mass staff exodus if and when the new complex is built.

Mrs Brett said: "We want ministers to think again. The doctors themselves do not want to move."

The latest setback emerged as fresh doubts were raised over whether the project will get planning permission from Westminster council. John Lister-information director of the patients' campaign group London Health Emergency, said: "This building is like another Millennium Dome - only worse.

"It has been nothing more than a succession of ever-more expensive blunders.

"Ministers should step in and stop it. Every extra day that goes by adds to the costs of accountants, consultants, architects and advisers.

"Ministers must call a halt right now to this waste of taxpayers' money."