Rishi Sunak blocked plans to rebuild five hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete when he was chancellor.
Just two of the seven hospital rebuilding projects requested by the Department of Health were signed off by the Treasury at the 2020 spending review when Sunak was chancellor and Steve Barclay, now the health secretary, was his chief secretary.
The other five were finally added to the new hospitals programme in May. In their most recent risk assessments, all five have been graded at “catastrophic” risk with warnings that an incident is “likely”.
