1 The Paddington Health Campus (the scheme) was a complex and ambitious attempt to build a world-class healthcare and research centre which ultimately proved to be beyond the capacity of the scheme partners to deliver.
2 The goal of the scheme was to build a health campus in Paddington with state of the art clinical accommodation. This would have met the strong clinical and operational drivers then supported by all organisations involved, and replaced three run-down hospitals - St Mary's, the Royal Brompton and Harefield. The scheme also included space for new research facilities for Imperial College, including the National Heart and Lung Institute, currently housed mainly on the Royal Brompton and Harefield sites. The Campus partners were Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust, St Mary's NHS Trust, Imperial College and, from 2002, Partnerships UK. The main organisations involved in the scheme are at Figure 1.
3 The Outline Business Case (OBC), which identified an "affordable preferred option" for investment was approved by the London Regional Office of the NHS in October 2000. It estimated the gross capital construction cost to be approximately £300 million (£411 million at 2005 prices), excluding optimism bias1, with completion by 2006. By the time of the scheme's collapse, in May 2005, projected costs had risen to £894 million (including optimism bias of £117 million) and the expected completion date slipped to 2013.
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1 Optimism bias, which was not introduced until 2003, is an adjustment to redress the tendency of capital schemes to be overly optimistic when assessing the cost of projects. Judgements on affordability after 2003 were based on the capital value including optimism bias.