Your recent article (£650m cost of new hospital, Watford Observer, June 11) revealed that West Herts Hospitals Trust are already scaling back their plans for future health provision even before, on their own admission, they have produced full and detailed costings for their proposed high-rise hospital at Watford and before any plans or costs have been released for the revamp of the other two parts of their three-hospital solution at St Albans and Hemel Hempstead.

Only last month I, and many of your readers, will have listened to presentations from the trust about the forthcoming “once-in-a-generation transformation” to our healthcare. After many years of inadequate stewardship on the part of the trust we were beginning to expect better things. Our hopes look as if they are being dashed within a matter of weeks.

Sadly, the trust’s blind determination to persist with the redevelopment of a heavily constrained, much-reduced Watford site has necessitated a high-rise, high-risk, high-cost solution which will struggle to conform with the thrust of the National Health Infrastructure Plan.

It appears that the trust’s response to an over-budget business plan is either to reduce the footprint of the Watford site still further or to reduce the height of the buildings.The physical constraints of the proposed site, as exemplified by the drastic and dangerous reduction over time in staff parking and a failure to provide adequately for a growing and ageing patient base over the next 60 years, mean that a decrease in ground area would increase the need for taller buildings and a reduction in the height of the buildings would create the need for more ground space. The trust has painted itself into a very tight corner.

What now of the planning application currently before Watford Borough Council? How can it be properly considered in the face of such fundamental changes as building heights and/or site footprint?

We have also been given an early glimpse of retrenchment in the mention of “new and refurbished buildings”, “not quite a full new build” and (merely) “a new build emergency care facility”. We had been promised a 90 per cent new build.

It is disturbing that the dubious outright rejection of a new acute hospital on a clear, central site, even as a control comparator, is already prejudicing the future healthcare of the people of West Herts.

Surely it is time for a rethink.

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