The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 152

Guest: Emma Whigham, Alliance Director and Rick Lennard, Chief Operating Officer, New Hospital Programme

Hospital 2.0 Alliance

In this week's episode we return to the New Hospital Programme - still one of the most ambitious public infrastructure programmes the UK has seen in decades. 

The last time I was in NHP’s Waterloo office in London was for episode 143 just before Christmas. Then I spoke to Emily King and Doug Baldock about the scale and urgency of the challenge to replace ageing and unsafe hospital infrastructure, and the shift towards industrialised construction through the £37bn Hospital 2.0 programme.

Today, we’re going deeper into the “how”. 

Because £37 billion of ambition only becomes reality if the market can actually deliver it.

To do that I am joined by Emma Whigham, Alliance Director for the NHP Alliance, and Rick Lennard, Chief Operating Officer for the New Hospital Programme. Together, they’re at the sharp end of designing and procuring the Hospital 2.0 Alliance - the new commercial and delivery model intended to underpin the programme for the next 12 years.

This is about more than building hospitals. It’s about reshaping how the NHS works with industry, creating a stable pipeline that gives suppliers the confidence to invest in skills, manufacturing capacity and modern methods of construction. 

It’s about standardisation without stifling innovation. And it’s about learning from decades of fragmented delivery to create something more programmatic, predictable and collaborative.

So let’s crack on and explore how the Alliance is structured, what early market engagement has changed, where the market pushback really is - or is likely to be. 

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