Investment vital to deliver 5YFV goals

Without substantial investment in the NHS estate, the Five Year Forward View cannot be delivered, and the estate will ‘remain unfit for purpose and continue to deteriorate’, an independent review of NHS property and estate in England headed by Sir Robert Naylor, the former CEO of University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (pictured), concludes. Among the recommendations of the DH-commissioned review – which considers the opportunities to generate valuable funds via the sale of under-utilised NHS properties – is the establishment of ‘a powerful new NHS Property Board’, to ‘provide leadership to the centre, and expertise and delivery support to Sustainability and Transformation Plans’. 

In the Executive Summary to the review report, NHS Property and Estates: Why the estate matters for patients, which was published on 31 March this year, Sir Robert Naylor, who, prior to spending 15 years as CEO of the UCLH NHS Foundation Trust, held the same role for a similar period at Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, says the review ‘presents the opportunity to rebuild NHS infrastructure to meet modern standards of service delivery for the future’. He goes on to explain that it ‘set out to develop a new NHS estate strategy which supports the delivery of specific Department of Health (DH) targets to release £2 bn of assets for reinvestment, and to deliver land for 26,000 new homes’, before adding: “As the Spending Review period has already started, and recognising that changes to the estate can take significant time to be realised, this review has also considered the opportunities presented in the medium term. This work suggests that the NHS can release £2 bn of assets, and deliver 26,000 homes, and, with an effective programme of interventions in high value propositions in London, this could significantly increase the property receipts to a figure over £5 bn in the longer term.”

Capital investment ‘insufficient’