THE Constable of St Helier has indicated he would back a move to stick with the existing hospital plans – provided the ‘unnecessary’ proposals to alter Westmount Road are abandoned.
Appearing on the latest episode of Bailiwick Express’s Politics Disassembled podcast, Simon Crowcroft said the prospect of a single-site hospital was ‘quite impressive’ and that he had ‘never had an objection’ to Overdale as the location for the multi-million-pound project. He said that his concerns related solely to the ‘collateral damage’ that could stem from widening the approved access route of Westmount Road to create a ‘super highway’.
The politician previously responsible for the Our Hospital project, Deputy Lyndon Farnham, has lodged a proposition that – if adopted – would prevent the government from abandoning the approved Overdale plans until it had ‘certainty’ that a multi-site scheme was a better option both clinically and financially.
Such a scheme was favoured by the recently published Our Hospital Project review – undertaken by expert adviser Alan Moore – which recommended scrapping the proposed single-site facility for a hybrid model, including the existing Gloucester Street site, adjacent land at Kensington Place and Overdale.
Mr Crowcroft said: ‘I’ve never had an objection to Overdale as a site for the hospital. I’ve supported it in the past and indeed I supported the funding request when it came to the States, because the States by that stage had decided upon their scheme.
‘What I have fought against passionately and consistently is the notion that to get to Overdale, you have to destroy a very important part of St Helier in terms of its environment and its heritage – indeed impacting on local residents as well.’
He added: ‘When the new government came forward and said we are not going to be pursuing the road, the “super highway” if you like, the destruction of the Jersey Bowling Club, the loss of Pierson’s bluff – the rocky outcrop that [Major] Pierson gathered his troops at in 1781 – that was tremendous news to me.’
However, he said that he was ‘slightly torn’ between the two options.
‘If the government had said we are going to build the hospital up at Overdale without doing those – what I consider to be unnecessary – road improvements, then I wouldn’t have had a problem with that,’ he said. ‘There was something quite impressive about the idea of having a single-site hospital that would administer to the bulk of the Island’s health needs and one which would sit proudly above St Helier.’
Commenting on whether he was going to back the existing plans, he said: ‘It will completely depend on whether Deputy Farnham’s proposition rules out the possibility of that collateral damage to Westmount Road, the Bowling Club, the trees, people’s homes and so on.’
Later on during the podcast, Mr Crowcroft also raised the concept of having a town council for St Helier. ‘There are an awful lot of things the government does which it needn’t do,’ he said. ‘Why is government running car parks? It doesn’t do it anywhere else. Why is it running a market? These are things that parish authorities could be doing that would grow the role of the parishes, as well as relieving the government of all that unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape.’
