Rishi Sunak blocked plans to rebuild 5 hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete three years in the past, prompting warnings of a “catastrophic” threat to affected person security, the Guardian has realized.

Just two of the seven hospital rebuilding initiatives requested by the Department for Health had been signed off by the Treasury on the 2020 spending evaluation when Sunak was chancellor and Steve Barclay, now the well being secretary, was his chief secretary.

The different 5 had been lastly added to the brand new hospitals programme in May, when the federal government amended the listing, but it surely has meant a three-year delay in beginning to rebuild harmful hospitals. In their most up-to-date threat assessments, all 5 have been graded at “catastrophic” threat with warnings that an incident is “likely”.

The 5 hospitals are Frimley Park hospital, in Surrey; Airedale normal hospital, Keighley; Hinchingbrooke hospital, Cambridgeshire; Leighton hospital, Cheshire; and the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn.

The revelations will revive the row over bolstered autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) which dominated the beginning of the brand new parliamentary session, with Sunak and his training secretary, Gillian Keegan, coming beneath fireplace for uncertainty and disruption over crumbling concrete in England’s colleges.

They come days after NHS bosses told hospitals throughout England to be able to evacuate employees and sufferers if buildings containing concrete prone to collapse begin to fall down.

NHS England issued the instruction to all 224 well being trusts on Tuesday in a letter from Dr Mike Prentice, the organisation’s nationwide director for emergency planning and incident response, and Jacqui Rock, its chief business officer, telling belief officers that they need to familiarise themselves with a “regional evacuation plan” drawn up by the NHS within the east of England in order that hospitals can implement it within the occasion that buildings that comprise Raac begin to crumble.

The 2023/4 threat register of Frimley Park hospital, which serves Michael Gove’s constituency, reported widespread crumbling throughout its buildings. It warned: “There is a risk of injury or death to patients, visitors, and staff due either to delamination of a roof plank whereby a part of it falls, or a sheer collapse with no warning due to limited bearing on the concrete support beam.”

Across the 5 hospitals there have been greater than 100 incidents, based on NHS figures, the place property or infrastructure failures resulted in scientific providers being delayed or cancelled within the yr following the Treasury’s determination to not embody them within the new hospital constructing programme.

Between them, that they had a “high risk” infrastructure backlog – the place repairs should be urgently prioritised to forestall main disruption – totalling £117m, however lower than a 3rd of that quantity was spent. There had been 21 affected person security incidents associated to vital infrastructure threat in 2021/22 on the 5 hospitals.

An NAO report in July, Progress with the New Hospital Programme, advised the chance of Raac to the 5 hospital buildings was recognized on the time of the Department for Health’s bid to the Treasury. However, the federal government determined in opposition to together with all seven hospitals as a result of “further assessment” was required.

Yet after a college roof collapse led to a nationwide alert in 2019 concerning the threat of sudden failure, NHS England requested trusts to survey their estates for Raac and 41 buildings at 23 trusts contained the fabric, together with the seven hospitals with Raac current all through which had been at explicit threat.

At a Westminster coverage discussion board on Tuesday, Tim Phillips, director of Health Value for Money on the National Audit Office, stated: “The NHS knew back in October 2020 that it had a lot of Raac across its estate, including seven hospitals that are to all intents and purposes constructed entirely of Raac.

“Back in 2020 the Department of Health actually proposed to the Treasury that NHP should be used to replace all seven Raac hospitals at that point, so in effect that all seven hospitals should be part of 40 new hospitals as early as 2020.

“But at that time, government decided that only two of the seven would be put in the programme. What we’ve seen since is that government has had to row back on that decision.”

Wes Streeting, the shadow well being secretary, advised the Guardian: “Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay are the guilty men of the crisis in our NHS. They literally failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining, putting patients and staff at risk and leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill.

“There is no image that better sums up what the Conservatives have done to our public services, than the sight of crumbling hospitals and schools.”

A supply near Barclay advised that as chief secretary to the Treasury he was liable for setting the general spending envelope, and that it was for the division to prioritise schemes.

A authorities spokesman stated: “These claims are untrue. The funding was not rejected by the Treasury, or the chancellor and chief secretary at the time, and there was an agreement to link these decisions into the wider new hospitals programme”.