A Birmingham hospital beset by delays after contractor Carillion collapsed has finally been given an opening date – six years after it was originally due to finish.
Midland Metropolitan University Hospital (MMUH, pictured), which is being completed by Balfour Beatty, will open on 6 October, the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust announced.
Work stopped when the UK’s then second-biggest contractor was liquidated in January 2018. The project had already been delayed by design issues before the Covid-19 pandemic, a change of cladding for safety reasons and material shortages pushed the PFI-funded job back even further from its original 2018 opening.
MMUH was one of Carillion’s big loss-making jobs in the years leading up to its liquidation, according to a legal claim against the firm’s auditors. Having won the contract in 2015, structural issues, as well as problems with mechanical and electrical designs, caused delays early on. Within 14 months of winning the £296.9m contract, which had a 6 per cent tender margin, the job was forecast to produce a margin of -5.2 per cent.
It took more than a year and a half to reprocure the job. Skanska looked set to triumph over Kier, when banks pulled £350m of funding, leaving the half-finished building at risk of deterioration.
Balfour Beatty started remedial works on site in late 2018, but did not officially sign the £267m contract to restart the job until a year later, after the government stepped in to invest the missing £350m.
At the time, the Treasury said it expected the job to complete in April 2022, ready for the Commonwealth Games that summer.
Covid set the project back further as site safety restrictions dragged on for months. In April 2020, the car park became one of the first Covid testing locations for essential workers.
Then, in 2021, part of the facade had to be redesigned after the proposed cladding failed fire tests. By 2022, material and labour shortages had added years to the programme and pushed the cost to £650m.
Once open, the 86,000 square metre hospital will provide acute and emergency care for more than half a million people. It will be one of the first hospitals to open under former prime minister Boris Johnson’s £40bn new hospitals programme, the timeline and scale of which has recently been thrown into doubt by the new Labour government.
Lindsay McGibbon, managing director of Balfour Beatty’s regional buildings business, said the reopening announcement was a “momentous moment” for the contractor and the NHS trust.
He said: “Achieving this milestone was only made possible thanks to years of hard work and dedication from our people, who deserve a special mention for safely and successfully delivering this long-awaited, transformative hospital, which will deliver significant benefits for the local community for years to come.”
Balfour Beatty is also building an £18m learning campus on the site, funded by the 2019 Towns Fund, which aims to support deprived towns across England.
