The cost of eradicating backlog maintenance across the NHS estate has risen to nearly £16bn, according to the latest statistics released by NHS England.

The publication of the annual NHS Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) for 2024/25 reveals the investment needed to restore buildings to a defined condition based on assessed risk, excluding planned maintenance, is £15.9bn – an increase of 15.7%.

Even more worrying is the significant increase in ‘high-risk’ backlog, which went up by 27.8% to £3.5bn, while ‘significant risk’ backlog also jumped by 14.2% to £5.6bn.

Responding to the figures, Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “Critical parts of the NHS are falling to bits, literally, after years of underinvestment nationally.

“The safety of patients and staff is at risk.

“We can’t keep wasting money propping up ageing buildings not fit for purpose.

“We welcome the Government’s commitment to increasing capital investment across the NHS, but we need to be able spend more of the NHS budget on modern facilities and up-to-date technology.

“Eye-watering sums are needed just to patch up buildings and equipment which are in a very-bad way right across hospital, mental health, community, and ambulance services.

“We need to make the NHS as modern and winter-proof as possible, but the waiting list of essential repairs keeps getting longer and costs are soaring.”

Siva Anandaciva, director of policy, events, and partnerships at The King’s Fund, a health think tank, added: “The data reveals a growing structural fault line in the cost to repair NHS buildings and equipment to the standard that patients and staff deserve.

“The cost of clearing the maintenance backlog for the NHS estate in England has risen to £15.9bn, more than the entire capital budget for this year and £2.2bn higher than last year.

“Decrepit NHS buildings have a real and detrimental impact on patient care, with regular examples of flooded corridors, reduced theatre capacity, and roofs at risk of falling in.”

And he raised concerns over the Government’s recent rethink of the New Hospital Programme and its plans to shift health services into communities, stating: “The programme was meant to be the centrepiece of plans to update and rebuild outdated estates, but changes to the programme alongside long delays and rising costs continue to leave staff and patients in limbo.

“Today’s data only covers NHS providers of secondary care – including hospitals, mental health trusts, and ambulances. There is also recent evidence of the deteriorating conditions of GP practices, many of which do not meet patients’ needs today and were built in a different century.

“These outdated practices risk undermining the Government’s ambitions to shift more care closer to the community.

“To develop a more-preventative and community-based NHS, the Government may need to focus any future growth in capital investment into the new neighbourhood health service, while being honest that more hospital estates may continue to go into managed decline in the meantime as a result.

“But these are exactly the type of tough trade-offs that face the Government – they will need to both make some bold choices on where funding should be prioritised and then explain what these changes mean for the care we receive.”

The ERIC data also revealed that the total cost of running the NHS estate – including all NHS trusts and ambulance trusts – was £14bn – up from £13.6bn in 2023/24.

£1.6bn was spent on cleaning (£1.5bn the previous year), while £800,000 was spent on providing inpatient catering services (the same as 20232/24).

And the estate saw an energy consumption of 11.3 billion kWh, at a cost of £11.3bn, up from £11.1bn in 2023/24.