Watchdog probes decisions made over controversial cancer centre

Martin Shipton

Audit Wales has revealed that it is investigating concerns relating to the project to build a £1bn cancer hospital serving south Wales.

The decision to locate the new Velindre Cancer Centre on a standalone site in north Cardiff has been hugely controversial, with more than 160 senior clinicians in cancer saying it should have been co-located with an existing general hospital.

Confirmation of Audit Wales’ decision to look at the project is contained in a footnote to its report on Cancer Services in Wales, which identifies serious shortcomings in cancer treatment.

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Decision-making

The footnote states: “We are conducting a separate examination of decision-making relating to the development of the new Velindre Cancer Centre. We aim to publish that report in 2025.”

According to the group Colocate Velindre, the UK Government’s rhetoric risks embarrassment in its own Welsh heartland for its anti-Nimby mantra “backing the builders not the blockers”.

The new centre is being built in the middle of a much loved local nature reserve known as the Northern Meadows. It’s thought likely, however, that Audit Wales’ focus is more likely to be on how the contract came to be awarded to a consortium including a company called Sacyr Construction, which was found guilty in Spain of the high-level fraud offence of bid-rigging, or ‘collusion’, stretching across 25 years.

During scrutiny sessions at the Senedd’s Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee it emerged that neither the Welsh Government nor Velindre managers discovered the Spanish verdict on collusion through their own diligence. The Committee expressed astonishment at the lack of curiosity or vetting by both the Welsh Government and Velindre.

Instead the Spanish decision was picked up and disclosed to the authorities by the alertness of lawyers.

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Out of step

In addition, the UK Government’s approval of the Welsh Government’s performance in relation to the issue seems out of step with itself. Labour supported the UK Government’s 2023 Procurement Bill, now through Royal Assent, which demands that companies in Sacyr’s situation in relation to criminal convictions must automatically be excluded from bidding. The most significant Westminster procurement bill in 10 years, going live in February, runs directly counter to the overriding mantra to just ‘back the builders’.

Another issue Audit Wales may consider is the absence of any documentation for the key deliberative process alleged to lie at the root of the whole project. n 2014 a group of health planners decided to disregard the UK’s clinical consensus that favoured new cancer centres being built at major hospitals. How the group arrived at the decision is not available on the public record as no minutes were apparently kept of the meetings. Nevertheless, planning permission was granted.

Even earlier, in 2013, Velindre and the Welsh Government moved straight to a cancer centre feasibility study for the outdated ‘standalone’ version. Critics of the project, however, felt that they had stumbled upon a lack of transparency, seeming deception and runaway entitlement in the whole process.

'Closer to home'

A spokesperson for Co-locate Velindre said: “Closer to home still for the UK Prime Minister, is another question. Is he perfectly happy for Sacyr to be the key operator in the consortium that will own the new cancer centre for 25 years? That means happiness for the company to have significant control over the facility’s configuration in a rapidly changing medical environment, especially for cancer. The details of this pay-back arrangement are not yet made public or even shown to the whole Welsh Parliament.

“A weak official scrutiny of a £1bn+ expenditure being spent on just one, curtailed outpatients unit has been exposed by the ‘blockers’, surely impacting many other cancer priorities. The reality is that disturbing truths often would never have become exposed without the diligence of the NIMBYs so openly pilloried by UK ministers. And the question troubling many must surely be: how can the UK Government be so sure that the situation around Velindre is not typical of many other contentious developments?”

Both the Welsh Government and Velindre NHS Trust maintain that their actions have been entirely lawful.