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By stewartb

‘Our research suggests that properly maintained Raac can easily last 50 years, and should be able to carry on for several decades after that.’

Proper maintenance? See this from the National Audit Office (January 22, 2025) on Westminster government’s neglect of its property portfolio, including NHS England’s estate. (https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/maintaining-public-service-facilities.pdf)

‘We calculated that the government’s maintenance backlog has increased steadily in recent years and is now at least £49 billion. This equates to approximately 4% of the government’s total expenditure in 2023-24, or around £710 for each person living in the UK (based on mid-2023 population estimates). The OGP has estimated that the actual cost of remediation (the real cost of repairs to improve property condition, rather than simply maintaining it) could be substantially higher, in some cases 10 times higher. MoD properties, schools and NHS properties have a backlog totalling more than £10 billion each and make up 88% of the total backlog.’ (OGP = Office of Government Property)

And: ‘The Department for Health & Social Care transferred £4.3 billion from its capital to revenue budget between 2014-15 and 2018-19, partly to prioritise day-to-day spending for NHS providers whose financial position had deteriorated. In November 2023, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that “the raiding of capital budgets in the recent past is an underlying cause of the estates crisis the NHS is now in”.

‘… between 2014-15 and 2023-24, NHS England’s backlog increased steadily, at an
average of £908 million per year (in 2023-24 real terms)‘ Elsewhere in the report (Figure 6) the NAO calculates that NHS England’s maintenance backlog has been increasing over this time by an average of 11% every year. From the NAO’s Figure 5 as of October 2024 the NHS England’s maintenance backlog was estimated to be £13.8 billion.

Of course, this considerable and long standing neglect of building maintenance for the NHS England estate coupled with the raiding of capital budgets to finance day-to-day spending within a financially struggling health and social care system in England, ALL will have had direct negative impact on the size of the so-called ‘Block Grant’ from the Westminster to the Scottish Government.

The contrast in agency is stark. From the NAO report we learn that Westminster/Whitehall has opted to neglect property maintenance, preferring to reducing spend from what is its largely unconstrained budgeting. But as the NHS is devolved, any Scottish Government concerned to meet basic property maintenance standards – and to avoid accumulating a huge maintenance backlog – has to vire funds from elsewhere in its largely fixed budget to make good what Westminster won’t!