£50m lifeline for hospital hit by Carillion collapse
RESCUE backers are in talks to plough in an extra £50million to save Carillion’s crisis-hit hospital project in Liverpool.
Insurance group Legal & General and the European Investment Bank have already committed around £180million to build the £429million Royal Liverpool Hospital.
New funds from the two lenders could ensure the delayed facility is finally completed next year, more than two years behind schedule.
The hospital, one of Carillion’s biggest failed projects, was left in limbo after the firm collapsed in January with debts of £1.3 billion.
Legal & General’s chief executive Nigel Wilson recently visited the site and is in talks with Health Minister Stephen Barclay, who has also inspected the project.
The building is 90 per cent complete but a new contractor has yet to be appointed to take over from Carillion. A source close to the negotiations said the two lenders are committed to finishing the project and want to ‘get on and get the hospital built’.
The new Royal Liverpool, which will replace the dilapidated 1970s hospital next door, was originally due to open last March but completion has now been pushed back to July next year at the earliest.
Last month, the chief executive of the Royal Liverpool Trust, Aidan Kehoe, said: ‘Carillion’s collapse has created an unprecedented situation with complex legal and financial issues to resolve.’
Another backer, the PIP consortium of pension funds, pulled out of the scheme following Carillion’s liquidation. Around half the costs for the state-of-the-art, 646-bed hospital have already been met by the Government through publicsector funds. Carillion’s collapse is so far estimated to have cost the taxpayer £148million. A Government spokesman said: ‘We are doing everything we can to complete the construction of the Royal Liverpool hospital, while ensuring value for money for taxpayers.’
However Labour MP Frank Field, who led the parliamentary committee into Carillion’s failure, said the Royal Liverpool stands ‘gathering cobwebs, as a creaking monument to the greed and hubris of Carillion’s directors’. He also claimed the hospital is ‘at the forefront of the accountancy tricks Carillion used to convince the outside world that all was rosy’.
Patients at the existing hospital said at the time of Carillion’s collapse that the ageing facility was ‘falling to bits’, and called the situation a ‘total nightmare’.