The project took a big step forward this week after several years of delays as ministers announced that Overdale was their preferred option for the new hospital.
And Assistant Chief Minister Lyndon Farnham, who is the political lead for the Our Hospital project, has urged members to set aside previous support for any of the discarded sites and to rally behind the Overdale project to ensure the new hospital can open on schedule in 2026.
‘We have a duty to future generations to deliver that hospital. It might be that some of us preferred another site for our own reasons but I want to make it clear that failure to support Overdale as a hospital site will be a vote against a new hospital,’ he said.
Ahead of the debate, the Senator will oversee a programme of engagement which will allow States Members to meet and speak to clinicians, the design and delivery partners ROK and FCC – responsible for building the new complex – and others involved in the project.
‘It will be an opportunity to disseminate information and to hear the aspirations of States Members, particularly important in the design process,’ Senator Farnham said.
Explaining what had ultimately tipped the balance in favour of Overdale over People’s Park, he said that the Overdale site allowed all the hospital’s functions to be accommodated on a single site with the opportunity for further development, whereas any desired expansion on the park would have created future planning difficulties.
He defended the decision not to look further into the potential of either Warwick Farm or St Savour’s Hospital – sites which St John Deputy Trevor Pointon had threatened to try to bring back into consideration, although the Deputy has subsequently withdrawn a proposition to that effect.
‘We can still make those arguments now but the last thing I wanted to do was to interfere in the process because if I had, or any politician had, and we’d usurped the process to put sites that had been disregarded back onto the shortlist, I don’t think we’d have done credit to the process. That is very important, especially when we go into the scrutiny process when we need to have a clean bill of health. I simply wasn’t prepared to interfere politically with the process because I didn’t want to compromise the project,’ the Deputy said.
With the cost of creating a new hospital at Overdale put at £550m with a further allowance of £250m for land purchase, contingencies and insurance against over-optimistic forecasts, the Senator said that the strategy for financing of the project would be brought to the States in 2021 by the Treasury Minister.
Senator Farnham is the subject of the two-page Saturday interview in today’s JEP [10 October].
