Private finance to be used for 250 neighbourhood health centres

The Government has committed to opening more than 100 new neighbourhood health centre sites by 2030, with funding to include private finance.

The Treasury made the commitment while announcing the ‘Neighbourhood Rebuild’ programme – a plan to create 250 ‘one stop shop’ centres, which health secretary Wes Streeting has previously said GPs will be a ‘cornerstone’ of.

Achieving a hoped-for 2% growth in productivity would ‘unlock’ £17bn of funding over the next three years ‘to be reinvested into the NHS in England’, it said, while also reaffirming it would explore funding the centres through public-private partnerships (PPP). 

It comes ahead of this week’s Autumn Budget in which Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said ‘necessary choices’ will be made to ‘protect our NHS’.  

Pulse has asked the Treasury to confirm if the Budget will set out specific funding details for the 250 neighbourhood services. 

The commitment that ‘more than 100 centres will be opened by 2030’ follows on from health secretary Wes Streeting’s July speech to parliament where he said the Government would aim to create ‘250 to 300′ centres by 2035 and ‘40 to 50 over the course of this Parliament.’  

As part of the new announcement, the Treasury also named specific sites that will be refurbished as part of the plans: including the Alfred Barrow Health Centre in Barrow-in-Furness, the Truro Health Park, the Stockland Green and Summerfield Primary Care Centres in Birmingham, the Jubilee Gardens Centre in Ealing and the Lawson Street Health Centre in Stockton-on-Tees. 

The Treasury said its Autumn Budget has also earmarked £300m for investment into digital technology for automating work like administrative tasks – to ‘improve productivity’ and give staff ‘more time to care’.

The Government reaffirmed it will explore private finance to fund neighbourhood health centres, trialling ‘construction delivered by a dynamic new approach between the public and private sector, involving both repurposing current estate and new buildings’. 

Previously, GPs had expressed concerns over proposals to reintroduce the model for taxpayer-funded projects ‘in very limited circumstances where they could represent value for money’. 

Around 130 NHS schemes were funded by the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) until 2018 and are expected to ultimately cost more than £80bn in repayments, with the model criticised for its inflexibility and perceived value for money. 

Minister Karin Smyth said public-private financing was necessary because predicted productivity gains would ‘only get us so far’. 

Ms Smyth said: ‘The Chancellor is rightly boosting investment in the NHS after we inherited a health service on its knees – with Lord Darzi’s investigation uncovering a £40 billion black hole. But funding will only get us so far.  

‘We need to use every measure available to us, which is why we’re leveraging in private investment to construct some of these centres, making the most of all expertise and every tool at our disposal.  

‘Our new NHS Rebuild approach will give the health service the investment it needs, repurposing and building a new generation of Neighbourhood Health Centres across the country. It will go hand in hand with reform and efficiency – ensuring proper value for money for taxpayers.’

Responding to the planned use of public-private finance, Andy Pow, adviser to the Association of Independent Specialist Medical Accountants, told Pulse: ‘While public-private partnerships could unlock the capital needed for the refurbishment and development of new larger health centres, this will lock in an annual cost of re-paying borrowing which may restrict the investment needed across the rest of general practice premises over the next few years.

In September, the Government announced the first 43 areas, covering more than a fifth of the population in England, which had been chosen to pilot the neighbourhood health service – with GP practices their cornerstone, Mr Streeting said the time. 

In anticipation of the Budget, the chancellor previously failed to rule out measures such as a 2p rise in income tax and cut to National Insurance, which experts have warned could leave most GPs worse off overall. 

This included a rumoured new tax on limited liability partnerships (LLPs), which caused uncertainty for GPs as reports in the national media suggested that this would represent a ‘tax raid on GPs’ or that the tax rise would ‘target GPs’ specifically. 

Pulse has contacted DHSC to comment on the Treasury’s announcement.