Inspections have revealed that Carillion used non-complaint cladding on the Royal Liverpool University Hospital that it was building at the time it went into liquidation
The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen Hospitals NHS Trust revealed that the cost of correcting serious faults is holding up plans to finish the project, where work halted last January.
Construction of the £335m Royal Liverpool University Hospital is near completion but requires another 12 months of construction work to complete it. Subsequent legal and financial negotiations have been complicated and made even more so by Carillion’s mistakes.
In a statement, the trust confirmed there has been added complications in reaching an estimate of the costs to complete the new Royal Liverpool University Hospital, as a result of remedial work required to correct faults created by Carillion.
It confirmed Arup had been engaged over recent months to identify the work required to complete the scheme and had identified the need for remedial work to the structure and cladding.
Adrian Kehoe, chief executive of Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Before they entered into liquidation, the Trust sought assurances from Carillion about this cladding and they told us that:
‘There are a number of different cladding systems utilised on the Royal Liverpool University Hospital all of which have been specified and installed to meet the required standards of fire safety….The new hospital has been designed to comply with the requirements of HTM05-02 Firecode – Fire Safety in the design of healthcare premises.’
“The recent review has found this not to be the case with some parts of the cladding.”
Although the cladding was not the same ACM system that contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire, it still has to be replaced with non-combustible material.
The trust also revealed it had a break clause in the existing project agreement to allow it to terminate the hospital company PFI contract, if the project is not handed over by the end of this month.
It said: “The board will be discussing all their options later this month. If the contract was terminated, we would need to engage the lenders in complex discussions regarding the status of their investment. These discussions would need to be resolved before a new contract to complete the hospital could be agreed.
“In the meantime, discussions between the government and the funders to agree a way forward are continuing and we expect these discussions to generate an agreed outcome very soon.”
