Today, the Trust provides services to 350,000 people across North London and beyond. In order to future proof the site, the Trust needed to develop new and expanded clinical facilities, whilst also replacing ageing office accommodation used for various core support functions.

At the same time, the Greater London Authority (GLA) was keen to address affordable housing shortages locally. This was also important to the Trust to ensure that the housing requirements of its own staff were met.

This case study explains how the Trust is tackling these challenges, working alongside the GLA, and how Capsticks is providing legal support.

Key challenges for the Trust

The key challenges for the Trust were:

• maintaining a full set of uninterrupted NHS acute hospital services throughout the redevelopment period, including sufficient car parking spaces, whilst minimising disruption
• ensuring availability of sufficient capital to develop new clinical and office premises.

How these challenges were overcome

The Trust developed a joint masterplan for the site with the GLA, which involved the sale of part of the site – previously used as a surface car park - to the GLA for affordable housing. This generated a capital receipt that could be used to develop a new multi-storey car park, which in return reduced the proportion of the total surface area of the site that would be needed for car parking, whilst maintaining sufficient numbers of car parking spaces overall. This then freed up further space for development and allowed the Trust to sell further parcels of land to the GLA for additional housing.

Part of the consideration for these further land sales was a commitment by the GLA to procure the development of new clinical and office facilities in lieu of an additional capital receipt.

The end result will be the provision of all of the required new clinical and office space on site, with all capital raised from land sales. This will transform the hospital site, as well as contributing to new housing requirements locally.

Capsticks' role and how we can help your Trust

A key part of our role, working alongside the Trust’s senior leadership team and commercial advisors (Jones Lang Lasalle), was to ensure that the development could be delivered in phases, without any interruption to service delivery.

This involved multiple land sales and sale and lease back transactions which were progressed in parallel. These gave the GLA the certainty it needed to proceed, whilst giving the Trust the time it needed to vacate parts of the site in a carefully planned and coordinated way over several years, thus:

• minimising disruption
• maximising available capital receipts across different financial years
• ensuring continuity of service delivery.

A further key aspect involved reserving appropriate overage provisions over the land that was sold, in order to ensure that the Trust obtained value for money for the long term.

How Capsticks can help

NHS hospital sites – particularly those in urban locations - are often a mixture of buildings developed at various stages in the history of the NHS. The lifetimes of those buildings can vary widely, and so a bespoke approach is required to ensure that all of these buildings remain appropriate for the delivery of modern healthcare services.

Capsticks has wide experience of acting on similar projects across the country. Whilst always protecting our clients’ position, we aim to work constructively with developers and house builders to ensure that our clients’ objectives are met, and that NHS hospital sites are future-proofed in a constantly evolving landscape.

For further help, please contact Sam Hopkins.