Dear Mr Johnson,

I and many other campaigners have argued the case for a new West Herts acute services hospital for years and I don’t want to repeat the reasons why we feel that building a new hospital on a clear site is the most logical and cost-effective solution for all the residents of West Herts.

The judicial review against Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Group is still pending and will cover the decision-making process that was used to eliminate the new hospital option at such an early stage in the evaluation process.

What now needs to be introduced into the discussion of new hospitals vs redevelopment of existing town hospitals is how do we deal with such outbreaks of such serious viruses as coronavirus?

The coronavirus outbreak surely raises the following concerns about WHHT’s plans for the three dilapidated hospitals in West Herts.

1. Should we really have our A&E hospitals in built-up town centre locations right next door to a Premier League football ground with thousands of fans coming into close proximity to a major hospital?

2. Redevelopment of the Vicarage Road hospital will take years to complete (may be lasting until 2031) and under 50% will be new-build.

If the redevelopment of Watford General Hospital had already commenced and the coronavirus becomes more widespread, what implications would this have had for the hospital redevelopment with loads of construction workers working all around the Vicarage Road site?

3. £400million is a huge sum of public money and could be put towards building a completely new ‘state of the art’ hospital - designed for our future generations’ needs by starting with a completely blank canvas. Unlike the current Watford General hospital, it would include a high percentage of single-bed rooms to help protect patients, hospital staff and the general public in the caring of infected patients and those with highly contagious viruses.

5. A clear site would allow uninterrupted construction without having to consider patients, hospital staff and the general public being around the site during the construction phase.

6. Should the NHS and government be pouring money into existing hospital buildings that were built in a totally different eras, in locations that that have become less accessible to the communities they serve and were built for much smaller populations or is this the time to build hospitals fit for the needs of an ever increasing and ageing population?

7. Such major hospital investment should also be in line with the Government meeting their targets for net-zero greenhouse gases by 2050 - redevelopment of Watford General hospital in a congested part of West Watford will surely not contribute to reaching these targets?

The Chinese have managed to build 1,000-bed new hospitals in just over a week - we need to seriously think how the planning process for new and replacement hospitals can be streamlined to enable the UK to undertake a rapid hospital rebuilding programme that will help us deal with such serious threats to human life, such as the coronavirus.

I’m not an expert in any of this but hopefully with all the knowledge we are gaining from dealing with the coronavirus, our hospitals and hospital staff will be much better placed in the decades to come to cope with such outbreaks.

Andrew Love

St Albans