The immense challenges and pressures facing our local hospital were laid bare when I attended the board meeting of West Herts Hospitals NHS Trust on January 10.

It is vital that we celebrate the fantastic work being undertaken by managers, clinicians and staff to turn the hospital round after the damning report of the Care Quality Commission in the summer of 2015. The Trust was taken out of ‘special measures’ a year ago and with strong leadership much progress is being made.

However, the board papers revealed that the trust is having to work with one hand tied behind its back and that it is not getting the support that it needs from central government.

The modernisation of all three hospitals in West Herts and of Watford in particular is a decade overdue. The redevelopment plans of the last Labour Government were scrapped in 2011 by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and it is only now that the Government is offering money to modernise the hospital.

But far from the minimum of £500 million the trust needs to undertake this work, the Government is offering just £300 million and in two instalments. Even worse this is to be a loan that must be repaid by the trust, which is already in severe financial trouble.

The extent of the trust’s financial crisis is massive. It is heading for a whopping £52.8 million deficit in 2018-2019. This is despite huge cost savings. It had to borrow £6.1 million in December just to pay the staff. This is the extent of the underfunding of our hospital by this Tory government.

There are major staff shortages that will only get worse if Brexit goes ahead. In accident and emergency they are short of six doctors, 31 nurses and 19 health care assistants. These shortages are repeated across other departments.

Consequently, the Trust is shelling out over £15 million a year to agencies to cover shifts and even then over 500 shifts a year remain unstaffed.

No wonder then that in November just 79 per cent of people attending A&E were seen within four hours against a target of 95%. And increasingly ambulance crews are unable to transfer patients into A&E due to a lack of bed spaces, thereby increasing ambulance response times.

This failure has to be laid at the door of MP Richard Harrington. Getting the investment and the funding our hospital needs should have been his number one priority, but here we are nine years since he was elected with him trying to persuade Watford residents that a one-off payment from his Government of £11 million is ‘major investment’. It is not.

We cannot go on like this. If the real policy of the Tories is to run down our NHS so that people are forced to go private then it’s not going to work as people will see right through it and we will resist it.

Watford Labour Party stands four-square behind the NHS Trust in supporting its plans for redevelopment. What we now need is an MP who will fight for the money.

Mike Jackson

Chairman, Watford Labour Party