- Rising numbers in asylum hotels: Govt must speed up processing to get backlog down
- Scottish NHS still relies on almost 600 buildings which are more than 70 years old
Rising numbers in asylum hotels: Govt must speed up processing to get backlog down
Responding to this morning’s immigration figures showing a rise over the past year in the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart MP said:
The asylum backlog has been far too large for far too long.
The Conservatives trashed our immigration system and let numbers spiral. Now this Labour government is failing to get a grip on the crisis.
The Government urgently needs to stop dangerous Channel crossings and speed up asylum processing to bring down the backlog and end hotel use once and for all.
Scottish NHS still relies on almost 600 buildings which are more than 70 years old
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today said that making sure the NHS has the facilities it needs to thrive must be a top priority, after new research by his party revealed that almost 600 NHS buildings are more than 70 years old.
A Scottish Liberal Democrat freedom of information request to all of Scotland’s health boards found that:
- There are 597 NHS buildings over 70 years old across Scotland.
- 121 of these are located in NHS Glasgow, where there are also 210 buildings up to 50 years old.
- 104 buildings are more than 70 years in old in NHS Lothian. This figure is 97 in NHS Grampian and 93 in NHS Tayside.
- In NHS Ayrshire and Arran 30 buildings are more than 80 years old – predating the founding of the NHS.
- Across Scotland, there are also at least 18 buildings which are both more than 70 years old and require high risk repairs.
In December, it was reported that NHS Scotland’s maintenance backlog was now more than £1.3bn.
Alex Cole-Hamilton said:
These figures show that the Scottish NHS is still relying on hundreds of buildings which are almost as old as the health service itself.
While there will be many old buildings which have undergone the appropriate modernisation, the scale of the NHS’s maintenance backlog suggests that many of them have not kept pace with where health boards would like them to be.
It is a national scandal that millions across the country are being treated in old and crumbling buildings that are no longer fit for purpose.
The SNP have constantly delayed and paused new building projects. I know from speaking with hospital staff that they believe poor facilities are holding them back from treating patients as swiftly and effectively as they would like.
In budget negotiations, Liberal Democrats secured commitments to advance the new Edinburgh Eye Hospital, as well as replacements for the Belford Hospital in Fort William and the Gilbert Bain in Shetland. But there are many more projects like these which have been neglected by the SNP for too long.
Making sure people can get swift access to local health care in safe buildings should be a top priority for every political party. That’s what you get with the Scottish Liberal Democrats. I don’t believe the SNP can say the same.
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12 Comments
@ Alex,
I don’t know what Thelma Davies has said. Has her comment been removed?
I’m guessing it’s about Lucy Connolly who has just been released following her 2.5 year prison sentence. She’s been released on licence after serving about a year of that.
I’m very much on the left and opposed to the comments she made but even so I do feel the sentence was excessive. It was a longer sentence than many of those who were convicted of doing the actual rioting. The workings of the legal system can be glacially slow at times. Except that it was all lightning quick when the Southport rioters and those making comments on social media were being dealt with.
It can only have been because of a political directive from the very top. This isn’t at all consistent with the notion of the separation of State powers between the Executive, the Parliament and the Judiciary.
It’s really not about whether or not Lucy Connolly said or wrote anything which was illegal. It certainly was. It is about how the State deals with offences of this sort. It shouldn’t be different in high profile cases and because of a political directive.
Why on Earth is it a problem if a building is over 70 years old? A building doesn’t become useless just because it’s old. It seems to me in the UK we are far too ready to demolish perfectly good old buildings and then put up new ones at huge environmental cost (as well as in many cases a loss to our heritage), just because the old building doesn’t match what a developer wants.
Lucy Connolly pled guilty to an offence which carries a maximum sentence of seven years. She served 10 months.
Here is a good explanation of the case from someone who knows what they are talking about Explaining a 31-month sentence for a tweet
As we saw in 2011 the criminal justice system acts swiftly and often quite harshly during periods of serious disorder and rioting. The idea that the Southport rioters were dealt with any differently than any other group intent on widespread violence and disorder is nonsense and bolsters false far-right narratives.
A pleasure to agree with Simon R…….. what on earth is Mr Cole Hamilton on about ? Does he never have afternoon tea in the Waverley (formerly North British) Hotel because it was built in 1848 ?
A clear statement about the awfulness of PFI contracts (e.g. the Royal Infirmary) would have been more welcome.
I don’t usually comment on press releases, I merely publish them for the edification of our readers, but on this occasion…
It should be noted that older buildings often generate higher running costs and maintenance expenditure. They can also be harder to keep clean and, in a world of superbugs and deteriorating staffing ratios, that offers a potentially significant risk to patients. Older buildings may also not be suitable for housing the sorts of gadgets and machines that support modern healthcare, before even touching upon questions of wiring and plumbing.
And Mr Raw, comparing hospital buildings to a hotel and restaurant is stretching it just a bit. If there’s a bit of dust in the corners, your excellent afternoon tea at the Waverley is unlikely to be impacted. Please enjoy a scone for me, regardless of how you layer the jam and cream…
Perhaps cutting the Health Spokesperson some slack might be in order, given that he has probably been briefed on the matter, whereas we have not.
They will have to do something about housing refugees in hotels . I suggest they should be allowed to work and sort out their own accommodation while waiting for their asylum claim to be determined. That would bring in some tax, reduced government costs, remove the focus for anti refugee demos & upset Reform. 🙂
@Simon R
A residential house over 70 years old may be OK – I live in one, although being a timber framed building it has needed some renovation.
But I very much doubt that the NHS can make much use of buildings of that age to accomodate the kind of equipment used in modern hospitals – scanners etc,
I’m always happy to buy a jam and cream scone for the eminent Mark at the Waverley next time he’s in Edinburgh, and as a transplant survivor over 14 years ago at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary I’ve a fairly intimate knowledge of the Royal, but I suggest Mark does a web search on the new children’s hospital next door to the Royal. He will discover about the costs and problems that can go wrong with PFI in a so called new building.
In the brief period her post was up Peter. It was her acerbic wit that probably got it removed. Even poor Brenda’s post got the same treatment. On any other political blog, it would have been seen as innocuous.
@ Andrew,
David Allen Green, in your link, makes a competent argument from authority on why any sentence is correct providing that the courts have followed the letter of the law and the CPS has acted appropriately according to its set guidelines.
Of course, legally, it has to be. I would hope that most of us don’t have quite such a mechanistic view of how the system should operate.
One factor that he failed to mention is the cost of defending any case in the Crown Court now that legal aid is very much a thing of the past for many defendants. The costs are going to be higher, regardless of the outcome, if a not guilty plea is made. The system also dangles a carrot in the form of a sentencing discount in exchange for a guilty plea.
I don’t know if these were factors in the Lucy Connelly case, she did in fact plead guilty, but it clearly was in many of the Post Office trials where incorrect guilty pleas were made.
Many people who call for tougher sentences for criminals cry foul when it’s themselves in the dock!
@Mark thanks for the reply. I can see the point about old buildings costing more to heat, but I’d expect the sums involved to be insignificant next to the £100s of millions it would cost to build a brand new building from scratch. Same thing if an old building needs to be rewired or have plumbing upgraded.
I’m unsure about the question of superbugs. I’m no expert but would expect the building-related risks of bugs spreading to be primarily determined by the nature of the surfaces and the ventilation/airflow. Both of those would seem like things you could upgrade in an old building for a lot less money than replacing the entire building.
I’m not opposed to building a new building if there’s a clear case for why that’s the best solution in a particular case, but I still wouldn’t wish to condemn a building just because it’s old, without first thinking through what the actual problems are and how they can best be addressed at reasonable cost. To my mind, complaining that X number of buildings are old does rather come across as implying a demand to build new buildings just for the sake of building new buildings.