A probe by the Daily Mail into the estimated £13.8bn maintenance backlog across England’s hospitals has revealed the five worst NHS acute estates.

Airedale General Hospital in West Yorkshire needs to fork out £316m just to fix ‘high-risk’ issues, although the total bill sits just below £340m when accounting for other necessary repairs.

Burst pipes, crumbling ceilings, and broken lifts are among the problems that plague NHS hospitals up and down the country.

The Mail’s audit of the health service’s entire estate covers almost 2,900 facilities.

Behind Airedale General Hospital ranked Charing Cross Hospital (estimated cost of £186m) and St Mary’s Hospital (£152m), both of which are in the capital.

Wycombe Hospital (£139m) and Croydon University Hospital (£113m) rounded out the top five.

In total, the NHS’s overall bill for high risk issues stood at £2.7bn in 2023/24 – nearly three times higher than the £1bn in 2015/16.

The backlog at 11 medical sites is entirely categorised as ‘high risk’.

The largest of these was University Hospital of North Durham, which treats over one million patients per year. Its estimated bill stood at nearly £2.6m.

When counting all four types of backlog monitored centrally by NHS bosses, Charing Cross Hospital had the biggest maintenance bill (£412m). It was followed by Airedale (£339m), St Thomas’ Hospital in central London (£293m), St Mary’s Hospital (£287m) and Northwick Park and St Mark’s in Harrow (£239m).

Helen Morgan, Lib Dem health and social care spokesperson, said: “When someone goes into hospital their only focus should be on getting better, not fearing the roof is going to cave in on them.

“Countless patients who should be focusing on their health are instead grappling with crumbling masonry, burst pipes and water leaking through the ceiling.

“Ministers need to step up and grasp this nettle before we see yet more buildings falling apart and patients put at risk.”

To repair the crumbling estate and carry out day-to-day maintenance, Rachel Reeves this summer vowed to invest £30bn over the next five years as she said the NHS was ‘on its knees’.

Critical building repairs, such as those highlighted in the Mail audit, will be targeted with a specific £5bn pot, the Chancellor announced.

Dennis Reed, director of the senior citizen campaign organisation, Silver Voices, told the Daily Mail that the NHS estate did not meet 21^st-century standards.

He said: “Money due to be spent on buildings has been used for current spending and pressures on staff and services, so it’s very shortsighted budgeting by the NHS and now they’re in a critical position.

“Some wards closed because they’re not sufficiently funded and some have buckets lying around the place to collect water when it rains.

“We hear this a lot of talk from this Government about timeframes that extend into the next Parliament, but it needs urgent treatment now because the NHS is in a state of accident and emergency.”

One of the primary concerns around the collapsing NHS estate is that of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).

Builders used it extensively in roofing between the 1950s and 1990s, when dozens of hospitals were built or upgraded.

The material is structurally weaker than traditional concrete and is prone to moisture absorption and collapse has led to fears ceilings could collapse.

Seven hospitals most affected by RAAC, including Airedale, were put under the New Hospital Programme (NHP) over fears they were ‘structurally unsound’.

The scheme – first launched under Boris Johnson in 2020 – vowed they would get a ‘full replacement’ by 2030.

Forty new hospitals were also promised in the NHP, although the definition of ‘new’’ was later clarified to mean upgraded.

But Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves said last year that they would need to set out a ‘thorough, realistic and costed timetable’ for delivering the scheme with four waves of development over the next decade.