Carillion’s failure adds at least £10m to hospital build costs

The additional cost of building the Midland Metropolitan Hospital after the collapse of contractor Carillion has now reached “eight figures”, the NHS Trust chief executive has said.

Smethwick’s new 670-bed Midlands Met Hospital should have opened in October 2018, but the fall out from the failure of Carillion means that the opening is expected to be delayed until 2022.

Work on the hospital stalled in January this year and it is feared that parts will have to be re-built causing added costs and further delays.

The chief executive of Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, Toby Lewis, thinks that unless the building is weather proofed by the winter time, costs will increase beyond the current estimates.

He said: “The collapse of Carillion in mid-January 2018 has caused building work to cease. The site is secured presently. However, it deteriorates in the elements and some parts of the building will require ‘re-work’. The Trust’s Board has asked for a formal assessment of that cost during June. However, we know that the cost will be in eight figures. We also know that if we have not weather proofed the building by winter 2018 that cost will rise further.

“We need to get people on the site, reducing the deteriorating of the site with the weather and preventing us having to rebuild parts of the two thirds built hospital. We need to agree with the government and others how best we can do that.”

In March a new contractor should have been appointed to complete the job, but that plan stalled as well and added to the already severe delays in completing the construction.

The local MP, John Spellar added: “The delay is causing a great deal of disruption to two other local hospitals and delaying improvements to the area, as the new hospital will of course see new jobs and housing arrive in the region , to the benefit of not only people in my constituency , but north of Birmingham too. I have raised this matter with the government multiple times. It needs to cut to the chase to make a decision on the future of the hospital to get things moving at the site again.”