As in 2019, Mr Johnson waited until the Conservative Party conference to unveil fresh details about his hospital programme, boasting “from Morpeth to Milton Keynes, we are building 40 new hospitals across England to level up our NHS so more people have top-class healthcare services in their local area.”

Facts

A Department of Health and Social Care press release following the 2020 Conservative Party Conference unveiled  details of the “40 new hospitals”. The pledge was to be delivered over 2 phases of the ‘Health Infrastructure Plan’ (HIP). 

The first phase (HIP1) is to be completed by 2025. HIP1 covers the first six hospitals to be rebuilt, renovated, improved or newly built, with the six allocated funding from the initial £2.7 billion injection into the scheme. 

Of the remaining 26 projects (8 remaining undeclared), at most 15 are genuinely new hospitals, and their respective NHS trusts have collectively received only £100million in ‘seed funding’. 

There are also 8 hospitals already being worked on from earlier governments, though the current Conservative Government appears to be claiming responsibility for those too.

Verdict

Mr Johnson’s false claim was an updated but equally deceitful version of the lies and fabrications told the previous year at the Conservative Party Conference about hospital building.