Royal Berkshire Hospital could move to Thames Valley Park

The move is being considered as part of government plans to build a new hospital for Royal Berkshire Health Trust.

Speaking to Wokingham Borough councillors on Monday, 5 June, the head of the Trust’s new hospital programme said it was eyeing up the two sites.

Alison Foster, programme director for Building Berkshire Together, said the two locations were “the closest to meet the criteria” for a new site. But she added the proposals were still in the very early stages of being considered – and the hospital could still stay where it is.

Foster said the Building Berkshire Together would need to do “much more work” to assess each site “to see if it’s affordable, if it’s got the right access, how long it will take to build on those sites.”

“That’s the work we will now do going forward in much more detail now we’re progressing,” she said.

Foster also said Building Berkshire Together was still looking at whether the new hospital could be built at the current site on Craven Road, Reading.

She said: “Our new hospital 2.0—can we build that on our current site? There’s a load of work that has to be done to evaluate and assess that.”

READ MORE: When will new Royal Berkshire Hospital be built, councillor asks

Royal Berkshire Hospital is among the 40 new hospitals that former prime minister Boris Johnson promised would be built by 2030. But the government’s health secretary Steve Barclay admitted last month that the deadline for a new hospital at Royal Berkshire was “stretching.”

Problems including the fact that part of the site is grade 1 listed, have held up work.

Liberal Democrat councillor Rachelle Shepherd-DuBey said this meant: “It seems like Thames Valley Park would be a better place because it’s near a motorway, it’s near Reading, and it sounds like a much better location because you could get ambulances there without the normal problems in that area.”

On problems facing building at the current site, Foster said: “It’s quite landlocked. It’s surrounded either by a conservation area or a residential area. The scope, if we wanted to build bigger, would be only to build up and therefore there might be some planning issues.

“We’re not in a position to say at the moment whether we can build on there, this new type of hospital, or whether we should be building elsewhere.”

She added: “It sounds like at face value the Thames Valley Park—it’s just down the road, it seems like it has good access. But until we start investigating some of these issues we won’t really know and that’s the next step of this process.”