Hospital delays a metaphor for Carillion collapse say MPs

The opening of the new £335m Royal Liverpool Hospital is set to be delayed following the collapse of construction group Carillion.

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust has said the building is unlikely to be finished in 2018.

Uncertainty also surrounds the completion of the £430m Midland Metropolitan Hospital, outside Birmingham, which was also being constructed by Carillion.

The West Midland site has stood idle since the firm’s collapse in the middle of last month.

The 646-bed Royal Liverpool was due to have opened in March last year but the project has suffered a string of delays.

Former executives from the Wolverhampton-based construction group were grilled by MPs on the joint Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Work and Pensions Committee yesterday.

Delays to the hospital was among the points raised during the four-hour hearing.

Former chief executive Richard Howson told the hearing that shortly after construction of the hospital was completed, an inspection discovered a cracked beam within the structure of the building.

He said that as a responsible contractor, the company had taken the decision to remodel the entire structure to ensure there could be no structural failing.

Mr Howson said the remedial work had cost the company an additional £20m and had led to inevitable delays to the timeframe.
“It was an exceptional event – those beams may never have failed,” he said.

“However, as a competent contractor we chose to rectify that.”

The chairman of the parliamentary committee, Frank Field, said the episode could be a metaphor for the company’s eventual collapse.

He said the firm had built something and then tried to patch it up later, rather than doing it properly first time around.

The hospital trust has now said that the opening of the new facility will be challenging but it was doing all it could to minimise delays.

Carillion collapsed last month with debts of about £1.5bn.