Rachel Reeves has announced the investment for 250 new Neighbourhood Health Centres to be built via public-private partnerships.
As expected, Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer, has confirmed the investment for 250 new Neighbourhood Health Centres. This was one of the three key shifts of the government’s 10 Year Health Plan in July.
The Neighbourhood Health Service aims to provide end-to-end care and tailored support. The idea of GPs, nurses, dentists and pharmacists together under one roof is to meet the needs of the community, starting in the most deprived areas.
“Neighbourhood Health Centres fundamentally reimagine how the NHS works – bringing care closer to home and making sure the NHS is organised around patients’ needs, not the other way round,” said health minister Karin Smyth.
But what is significant about the move is that it rehabilitates the much-maligned public-private partnerships (PPP).
“By delivering through a combination of private and public investment, the government will be able to build further evidence and compare different models of delivery whilst updated accounting treatment will ensure these are recognised up front in public accounts,” the government said.
Avoiding past problems
This is precisely the model highlighted by Healthcare Today in our budget preview last week.
The government is clearly keen to avoid the problems with the structure in the past. “This government will only supplement public investment with private investment where it provides value for money to the taxpayer. This new PPP model will learn lessons from past and current PPP models, and include improvements so that taxpayers get proper value for money,” it said.
Carly Caton, commercial healthcare partner at law firm Browne Jacobson, explained that the problem wasn’t the model of PPP itself. “The issues arose from the way it was implemented and from certain elements that, in the early schemes, simply weren’t properly thought through,” she said.
Caton went on to predict that the government was likely to focus on smaller-scale projects, such as neighbourhood centres, as “the process may be easier to manage”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news was greeted with open arms by trade body the Association of Infrastructure Investors in Public Private Partnerships (AIIP) which called it a “welcome and pivotal moment”.
John Hutton, Lord Hutton of Furness, who chairs the AIIP, said that investors are gearing up to help deliver on the government’s ambitions.
“We acknowledge that PFI was not perfect, and we have developed recommendations on new models to simplify contractual arrangements, deliver better value for taxpayers and ensure better oversight of contracts,” he added.
More than 100 centres will be opened by 2030, including refurbishments to the Alfred Barrow Health Centre in Barrow-in-Furness, the Stockland Green and Summerfield Primary Care Centres in Birmingham, and the Jubilee Gardens Centre in Ealing.
