A Provelio briefing for Estates Directors and scheme leads at the New Hospitals Programme NHP.
Your data will be an essential building block for your future development
The New Hospitals Programme waves were not allocated by judgement alone. They were allocated by a scoring model, and the model ran substantially on data that Trusts submitted themselves.
When the Department of Health and Social Care published its implementation plan for the New Hospital Programme, it set out exactly how schemes were prioritised into waves. A multi criteria decision support analysis tool was used, and the input data came in large part from public sources: the NHS England Estate Returns Information Collection, Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment, and Office for National Statistics data.
ERIC and PLACE are collated and submitted by Trusts for their own sites, then consolidated by NHS England.
The specific inputs that carried weight in that model are worth reading closely, because they are all estate data points:
- Clinical incidents caused by infrastructure, staffing, facilities and environment, per square metre, from ERIC.
- Clinical service incidents caused by estates and infrastructure failure, from ERIC.
- Privacy, dignity, wellbeing, condition, appearance and maintenance scores, from PLACE.
- Weighted average age of the estate, from ERIC.
- Removed critical infrastructure risk per square metre, from ERIC.
- Maturity of business case development, assessed by the programme delivery team.
The Department was explicit about the limitation
Its own published account of the review notes limitations in the data, because some of it is Trust reported and not independently validated. It also records that the model could not account for wider context factors that do not appear in the public data.
This is not a criticism of any Trust. It is a description of how the system works. Estate data that was gathered for statutory return purposes was used to make a decision worth billions of pounds and, for the 18 schemes in Waves 2 and 3, a decision measured in years of waiting.
The same categories of data will now be used again, repeatedly, through business case development, through interim capital allocation, and through every conversation about what happens to your estate before the new building arrives.
What the timetable actually asks for
The New Hospitals Programme’s phased delivery model means construction is between four and fourteen years away. The evidence work is immediate.
The Department has confirmed construction start windows for every scheme. Wave 2 schemes start between 2030 and 2035. Wave 3 schemes start between 2035 and 2039, with several not beginning until 2037 to 2039. The Public Accounts Committee reported in April 2026 that the final schemes are now due to complete in 2045-46.
The implementation plan is clear that the intervening period is not empty. Schemes starting in later waves will have opportunities to progress work to prepare them for construction, subject to meeting value for money criteria, including business case development and critical work such as securing planning permission, and in some cases enabling works such as multi-storey car parks, energy centres, roads and demolition.
Read that carefully. Preparatory work is available, but it is conditional on meeting value for money criteria. Value for money is demonstrated with evidence. Evidence comes from data.
Three demands, one dependency
Between now and the first spade in the ground, a Wave 2 or Wave 3 Trust has to answer three questions, over and over, to different audiences.
Which interim works are unavoidable, and which are not?
The Public Accounts Committee put the total NHS maintenance backlog at £15.9 billion in 2024-25, and recorded written evidence that the annual increase in the backlog exceeded the investment made to reduce it. It also noted written evidence raising legal and compliance risks associated with Trusts operating end of life buildings for far longer than intended.
So the question becomes: which spend on a building scheduled for replacement in the 2030s is unavoidable safety and compliance work, and which is discretionary? That question has to be answered annually, defended to a board, and answered consistently again the following year.
Is the capacity case still right?
The programme business case assumes a six per cent average increase in overnight beds across schemes built to the Hospital 2.0 design. Across eight schemes where detailed modelling was done, the increase ranged from one per cent to 34 per cent, an average of twelve per cent. The Department has described the six per cent as a broad assumption developed at programme level, with further modelling under way scheme by scheme, and told the Committee it expects bed forecasts to reduce during the business case process as care shifts into the community.
The Hospital 2.0 design itself will not be fully assured until autumn at the earliest. A capacity case built now will be tested against assumptions that are still moving.
Can you evidence any of this at short notice?
The Committee reported a central programme vacancy rate of 39 per cent as at November 2025, and written evidence from NHS Providers that interactions with the central team on critical issues were still inconsistent and more streamlined governance arrangements were needed. In practice, a significant share of programme governance sits locally, across a horizon of ten to fifteen years, during which the people involved will change more than once.
All three questions have the same dependency.
Condition, compliance, utilisation, and cost data, held together, current, and traceable to source. Not gathered again from scratch each time a submission is due.
Why this is hard and not a local failing
The difficulty is structural. It sits in the technology landscape and the funding history of the sector, not in any Trust or estates team.
The information needed to answer those three questions sits across condition surveys, statutory compliance registers, planned maintenance programmes, energy and carbon data, space and utilisation records, and finance systems. Those systems were built at different times, by different suppliers, for different purposes. None of them was designed to answer a question that spans all of them.
Lord Darzi found the NHS was starved of capital in the 2010s, with £37 billion of under-investment over the decade. Estates teams have been asked to run an ageing estate on constrained budgets, with tools that were never intended to talk to each other. That the prioritisation conversation often runs on the judgement of a few experienced people is not a failure. It is a rational response to fragmented information.
It stops working when the same question has to be answered annually for a decade, consistently, in writing, to a board, a regional team, and a central programme, by people who may not be the same people who answered it last time.
What good looks like
Below are a selection of questions that you will be asked and what in turn, your data must be like.
Which interim works are unavoidable?
Backlog, statutory compliance, and lifecycle data held together, so risk and remaining life can be read against one another, with an explicit and repeatable prioritisation logic
Is the capacity case still right?
A single version controlled baseline of condition, space, utilisation and cost, with scenario modelling that can be rerun when central assumptions move and the difference explained
Can you evidence it?
Every figure traceable to its source, decisions and their rationale recorded in a system rather than in documents and individual memory
Does the preparatory work represent value for money?
Cost, condition and risk evidence assembled to the standard a business case gateway expects, available on request rather than built from scratch
How Provelio helps
We help Trusts identify and prioritise the work their estate needs, using data and digitisation. We can then help deliver it.
That order matters. The starting point is not a building programme. It is understanding the estate well enough to make defensible decisions about it, and holding that understanding somewhere it stays current.
We work with NHS Trusts, Russell Group universities, councils, the Ministry of Defence, and corporate occupiers. Because we deliver as well as advise, the prioritisation we produce is grounded in what can actually be done on a live acute site, at what cost, in what sequence. The analysis and the delivery inform each other.
Where we start
- Establish the baseline – Bring condition, compliance, backlog, space, utilisation and cost data into one place, with a clear view of what is current, what is stale, and what is missing.
- Make prioritisation explicit – Turn the interim investment question into a repeatable method that produces the same answer for the same inputs, and can be explained to a board.
- Model the options – Test capacity and space scenarios as central assumptions change, and keep the difference between versions visible and explainable.
- Hold the governance – Record decisions, assumptions and rationale where they remain accessible after the people who made them have moved on.
- Deliver, where that is useful – Take the prioritised programme through to delivery, including backlog maintenance, decanting, and capital works.
The services and the platform
Below we have illustrated several items you may need, what service we can provide to assist with this, and how OPAL can support this.
For context, OPAL is our enterprise property and real estate platform. We built it out of two decades of consultancy experience within the NHS, Higher Education, Defence and Corporate Estates industry, so it’s designed around the questions estates teams are usually asked. Instead of replacing the systems you already run, it integrates with them to save you the hassle of migrating to new software. It’s deployed typically within twelve weeks and supports scenario planning pertaining to new builds and retained estate. It also can support PFI hand back and net-zero carbon planning.
Requirement 1: A defensible view of estate condition, risk and cost, in one place
- Our solution: Estates and Property Analytics
- How OPAL supports: Operational Performance and Asset Management. OPAL integrates existing systems rather than replacing them.
Requirement 2: Prioritised interim investment you can evidence to a board
- Our solution: Maintenance and Compliance Management, with Strategy and Advisory
- How OPAL supports: Maintenance and Compliance for statutory obligations and backlog, with lifecycle and remaining life visible alongside
Requirement 3: A capacity and space case that survives changing assumptions
- Our solution: Strategy and Advisory
- How OPAL supports: Scenario and Option Modelling, with Space Management for utilisation
Requirement 4: Programme governance that lasts longer than the people in post
- Our solution: Programme and Project Delivery
- How OPAL supports: Digital PMO for real time monitoring, control and reporting
Requirement 5: Delivery of the prioritised works
- Our solution: Programme and Project Delivery & Maintenance and Compliance Management
- How OPAL supports: Digital PMO, with the same evidence base carried through from analysis into delivery
The point
Estate data determined which wave you are in. It will determine how well you argue your case for the next ten years.
The scoring model that allocated the waves has run. That decision is made. What has not yet been decided is how the next decade goes: what preparatory work gets approved, how interim capital is allocated across your sites, whether the capacity case holds when the assumptions move again, and whether any of it can be evidenced quickly when someone asks.
All of that runs on the same data. The Trusts that put that evidence base in place early will spend the next ten years using it. The rest will spend the next ten years rebuilding it, every time someone asks.
Contact us
If you’re interested in discussing this topic more or want help with your scheme, please do get in touch. In just fifteen minutes, we can determine where your evidence base currently sits, and what the most practical first step is. This isn’t a proposal, just a demonstration of what OPAL can do.
Visit our contact page for more information: Contact Us – Provelio
Sources:
Department of Health & Social Care (2025) New Hospital Programme: plan for implementation. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: New Hospital Programme: plan for implementation – GOV.UK [Accessed 24 July 2026].
UK Parliament (2026) New Hospital Programme update. Seventy-sixth Report of Session 2024-26. [online] Available at: New Hospital Programme update [Accessed 24 July 2026].
National Audit Office (2026) Update on the New Hospital Programme. Department for Health & Social Care. [online] Available at: Update on the New Hospital Programme [Accessed 24 July 2026].
