AFTER years of burgeoning costs, the building and development of Jersey’s long-awaited new hospital will have to stay within budget, the Treasury Minister has warned.
Deputy Elaine Millar, who is responsible for the £710 million project’s funding, was questioned by the Hospital Review Scrutiny Panel yesterday.
More than £130m has been spent in the 12-year saga of creating new healthcare facilities in the Island, with proposals being rejected, shelved and changed over the years.
The development of the Our Hospital project between 2019 and 2022, which would have seen a single-site hospital at Overdale, accounted for £83.8 million of this spending.
The new programme, estimated to cost £710 million, includes an acute hospital at Overdale and the development of an ambulatory facility and health village.
The new facility is now at RIBA Stage 2, the third of eight stages for new buildings set out by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Deputy Millar stressed: “I would expect capital projects to be managed within the budget that’s allocated to them.”
She said: “People have got to stay within the public finance manual.
“And if people just ignore that and decide to put gold-plated taps, then that is not within the public finance manual.”
She added: “If there is any issue with that spend – if suddenly someone realised, and I don’t believe this is going to happen, that they had underestimated quite considerably on the cost of bricks – that would be reported to me.”
States treasurer Richard Bell said the next “key point” in the project would be it going out to contract.
Mr Bell added: “Thereafter, it is largely for the project to manage, and the expectation will be that we do not get to the point of overspend.”
Deputy Millar stressed that current health facilities were “no longer up to standards”.
“I think the public want to see a new hospital. They want to see a new hospital pretty quickly,” she said.
