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Excitement around the government’s hospital building programme has diminished significantly since it was first announced.

The programme has been hit with delays and rising costs, while many local plans are being torn up in favour of a standardised national template.

Junior minister Lord Markham now claims the prison building programme is the “best example” of a similar approach – which he says will eventually turn into a “cookie cutter” rollout.

Prisons might not be local staff’s favoured analogy, but the government is clearly keen to control costs and maximise economies of scale.

Both Lord Markham and Natalie Forrest, the New Hospital Programme chief, said the hold-up on much-anticipated announcements was due to the logistics of trying to incorporate five hospitals with unsafe RAAC roofs into the scheme. We suspect there’s also the small matter of squeezing quite a lot of quarts into a single pint pot — ie, letting down dozens of areas which won’t be given enough cash to build their schemes.

A decision on RAAC is going to have to come before any announcement on the eight final schemes to join the final cohort, according to Ms Forrest. A decision was initially expected last spring. 

Also on hsj.co.uk today

In The Ward Round, Annabelle Collins highlights that the number of NHS staff quitting their jobs has reached worrying new heights as more than 42,400 staff voluntarily resigned from the health service in quarter two of this year and in news we report another sharp drop in emergency care performance with only three trusts hitting the “new A&E target”.