Future Cities Forum report: New Hospital Programme
- 6 days ago
- 22 min read
Image: North Manchester General Hospital, courtesy of Sheppard Robson - part of the UK government new hospital programme.
Future Cities Forum is releasing its report on the new hospital programme, looking at current projects involved in the programme and reflecting on its gathering of research and contributions to its hospital programme discussions last year which took place at the recently restored spaces at the historic Barts North Wing in London.
There has been a recent announcement by the UK government (30th July), of eleven significant long-term partnerships, that have been signed to deliver new hospitals across England from Manchester to Cornwall and the east of England.
The Government says the confirmed partnerships will transform how NHS hospitals are delivered across England, marking a major milestone for the New Hospital Programme as it moves into its delivery phase.
In this report, we ask:
What does the future hospital look like and can the new programme achieve long-term sustainability?
Will the approach to dealing with RAAC be successful?
What is the increased role of public realm around hospital buildings in improving patient health?
How is digital planning helping to make the design of hospitals more efficient?
Should the UK government develop a joined-up energy policy to site data centres close to and adjacent to hospitals for heating and cooling needs?
During our August data centre forum discussion, Mace Construct Director, John Jeffery questioned why there is no energy policy in the UK to site data centres next to hospitals for heat supply. He said:
'The UK doesn't have a joined up energy policy around data centres. Mace has been very invested in its work around the New Hospital Programme, so I ask the question, why hasn't the Government mandated data centres to provide free heating and cooling next to hospitals.' See below for more commentary on this.
Contributors included in this report are: Ann Hepworth, Group Chief Strategy Officer at Barts Health NHS Trust, (which comprises St Bartholomew's, the Royal London, Mile End, Whipps Cross and Newham hospitals) Ben Wall, Associate Partner (Health + Care), Sheppard Robson, Katie Gosling, Strategy and Improvement Director - New Hospital Programme, NHS England, Mike Shaw, Director of Design - New Hospital Programme / Design Director Mace Group, James Schofield, Partner, Price and Myers, and Oliver Blythe, Associate Director, Buro Happold,
The recent release of the 11 confirmed partnerships by the UK Government - July 2026:
The UK government states:
'The agreements bring together NHS trusts and leading construction organisations to deliver 11 hospital schemes through a new collaborative approach that is designed to build modern hospitals more efficiently, while ensuring every scheme continues to meet the needs of its local patients, staff and communities.
'The partnerships will support the delivery of Hospital 2.0 - the New Hospital Programme’s modern, standardised approach to designing, building and operating hospitals. Combining national standards, digital innovation and modern methods of construction, Hospital 2.0 will improve quality and productivity while creating healthcare environments that are safer, more sustainable and fit for the future.
'The agreements mark the start of delivery for the first wave of partnerships, enabling NHS trusts and their construction partners to move forward with delivering hospitals that will serve communities for generations to come. The contracts will also deliver a pipeline to support the growth of the construction industry and development of skills.
'Under the new delivery model:
NHS trusts remain responsible for delivering hospitals that reflect the needs of their local communities
national standards will improve quality, consistency, and value for money across the programme
long-term partnerships will encourage collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement throughout delivery
'The Hospital 2.0 Alliance brings together the New Hospital Programme, NHS trusts and construction partners in long-term partnerships designed to transform how hospitals are delivered. Rather than treating each hospital as a stand-alone project, the approach enables organisations to share expertise, apply consistent standards and continuously improve delivery across multiple schemes.'
Image: North Manchester General Hospital - courtesy of Sheppard Robson
North Manchester General Hospital - with a new energy centre and digital design:
Sheppard Robson's work on the redevelopment of North Manchester General Hospital, part of the New Hospital Programme, includes an energy centre, driving the transitions to lower carbon operations. There is also emphasis on green space and health and wellbeing.
Sheppard Robson describes the project:
'The redevelopment of North Manchester General Hospital is an opportunity to redefine how an integrated health campus can support its community. Working closely with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, we are leading the transformation of this 27‑hectare site into a coherent civic landscape—one that brings together next‑generation healthcare, education, homes and public realm. This 10‑year, £1.5bn project is designed to deliver long‑term social, environmental and economic value for North Manchester.
'At the heart of the campus is the new 105,000sqm acute hospital, designed in alignment with the New Hospital Programme’s Hospital 2.0 standardised components. We weave these rigorous templates into a bespoke architectural response—one shaped by the site’s geometry, its operational requirements and the Trust’s Target Operating Model.
A custom communication module stitches the templates into a cohesive whole, ensuring the building functions with efficiency while retaining a strong architectural identity. Long‑reaching views, generous daylight, intuitive wayfinding and calm, legible circulation routes underpin an environment that supports patients, staff and visitors at every step.
'The campus includes an Energy Centre driving the transition to lower-carbon operations, and a new mental health inpatient facility shaped around therapeutic landscapes for restorative care. A community-facing outpatient hub blends clinical services with social amenities, creating a civic destination for Crumpsall, while an education hub opens pathways into healthcare and supports local employment.
'At the heart of the campus, a village green connects to the surrounding neighbourhood, alongside a Hospital Trust office building and multi-storey car park integrated within the sustainability strategy.
Medical Architecture, which has been working with Sheppard Robson adds:
'The design concept promotes the well-being of staff, patients, visitors and the community. A pattern of courtyards and lightwells provide daylight, views and access to outdoor space deep within the hospital.
'Digital technology plays a fundamental role in the design, with fully integrated systems that enable patients and visitors to use the village green, spine and public courtyards before and after treatment, minimising the need to dwell in waiting areas and clinical departments.
'The ‘digital by design’ approach has enabling a marked shift in the delivery of care, reducing the site footprint required to deliver increasing volumes of care as demand grows.'
Image below: courtesy of Sheppard Robson
Sheppard Robson's Ben Wall told Future Cities Forum:
'I think with the North Manchester project, it's pretty important that we understood the community in which we sat. The people in the area actually love the existing hospital. You can see it's a lovely, lovely hospital. It's got a lot of Victorian architecture.
'But the powerful thing about this scheme is that we were able to have a strategic redevelopment framework, which meant that we really considered how to site links with the local area. So, we've got Crumpsall Park down there, an old Victorian park. And we've really looked at the red line in the hospital, how you use the red line, use the big blue sign and make the hospital part of the area in which it belongs. The vision is that this is not just the new acute hospital.
'It's also got a healthy community, with healthy living space. We've got some commercial areas. We're looking to reuse some of the Victorian wings for administration and things like that, and at the heart of everything is this village green with a view that we're inviting in Crumpsall to the hospital. It's not just this monolith in the area that we're standing on the site. And it also emphasises that shift away from healthcare to health and wellbeing. There's a wellbeing hub on the site.
' It's really stepping back from this one hospital approach that's going to solve everything. I think that links quite well to the 2.0 vision of an essential hospital and then that's sitting within wider, smaller scale interventions. So, you do end up with this really neat, efficient, quite clinically intense building but you provide softer space around that.
'Manchester is an extremely wealthy, vibrant city and this hospital is right on the outskirts of it. It's a parallel world. You get the tram tracks that you see throughout Crumpsall. It's a very different area and space. It's all about trying to be smart about what we're doing. The idea of the Village Green is where we bring together its health, its sustainability, its community. It's all these things that we're trying to bring together. That is the intention.
Image: Landscape design for Whipps Cross University Hospital, part of Barts Health Trust - courtesy Fira Landscape Architecture
Whipps Cross and the need to transform to the 'green hospital'
Barts Health NHS Trust is building a new net-zero carbon hospital at Whipps Cross as part of the New Hospital Programme (part of wave 2). The vision is to create a 'hospital in a garden and a garden in a hospital' reconnecting it with its Epping Forest setting.
The new hospital will provide a better experience for patients and staff, and will be able to adapt to changing healthcare needs in the future through its flexible design The wider Whipps Cross site will also be transformed through the construction of up to 1,500 new homes and the creation of 58,500 sqm of new green space and parks.
Future Cities Forum asked Ann Hepworth, Group Chief Strategy Officer at Barts Health NHS Trust, to describe the programme for Whipps Cross University Hospital:
Ann has recently joined Barts from Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT) and she is supporting Barts Health Trust's hospital chief executives in developing place-based partnerships, that they say will deliver tangible improvements for local people and tackle health inequalities in the community:
Ann said:
'As a smaller hospital the initial case for the hospital was to actually take out beds. The point of the hospital and the building is we need to have some walls that aren't coming down, we need clinical buildings that actually work. But at the same time, the real drive was to transform the way that we did the care. That was the point about taking out 10% of beds in the new hospital that we were designing. We are doing that very much in conjunction with local communities, doing that in conjunction with local partners, and we are starting to do that shift that's now described in the 10-year plan.
'The NHS 10-year plan is built on three major shifts that the government is introducing, one of which is moving care from hospitals to community. And our Chair has been warned about it, and I'm starting to agree with him, because I think there's something here about hospitals and community, the hospital isn't community, which I think is what we're building here.
'I relate that back to one of our hospitals, Newham, a 1980s-built hospital, and they're spending up to millions of pounds on making it like that. But it sits in a great campus in Newham, to provide community again, right back in the middle of it. There's a fair amount of space around it. It's also got 200 health units on that particular campus. So two high schools and a college around that campus, and a leisure centre on the end of it. There is an opportunity to create something like this in terms of an acute space, which may be smaller, but if we make that bed shift for both services and also the community, so it may be a smaller acute space, but overall it's a really good integrated campus.'
The development of the 'green spine' around the old hospital in Tower Hamlets was mentioned in supporting the health of all ages of the borough's population as well as new science labs to develop innovation.
Ann said:
'Certainly the life sciences campus that we're building, now starting to build alongside the London Hospital, does exactly that. And yes, the environment around that space space is incredibly important to us, the greenway, making sure that there's more public realm in there, so kind of breaking down the walls of the hospital so that it feels as if it is a public space is really important to us. Making sure that there's good quality accommodation on there is really important.
'And also there's something about creating that link between the life sciences companies, the clinical staff in the hospitals, and the local communities. Because at the moment the life sciences, the wet labs, fire labs, it's all very kind of pointy-hatted, very high-level work that's going on there.
'What they want to do is direct, is get in their products and their solutions and their therapies out to the local communities. And how we describe ourselves at Barts is forming a super highway between those life sciences and those local communities. So in building a space, what we need to be doing is making a space where life sciences and clinicians and communities can actually physically come together. And that's one of the things that we're starting to look at. It would also help to have a really nice coffee shop!'
The planning of the new hospital programme and its aims:
Katie Gosling, Director of Strategy and Improvement for the NHP at NHS England, described to Future Cities Forum the benefit of the hospitals programme and particularly the importance of tackling RAAC - the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete crisis :
'We did the new hospital program and we generally concluded, and in that conclusion, the government agreed that we would roll out the program. Now, that had some impact across the board, particularly for schemes like Whipps Cross, who were in wave two and then others in wave three. But what it did do is create a fully deliverable funded programme and a commitment of £15bn five year only programs. And the new hospital program is really, although it will accumulate with new hospitals, it's really about transforming care. So it's just around really understanding and combining together in a more standardised way, care, the spaces, and just creating confidence in our ability in the NHS to continue to deliver and build hospitals in the same way as we've done in education and obviously prisons as well.
'We're introducing Hospital 2.0, which is more of a standard design, but when I say it's standard design, Michael (Shaw) talked more about it, it's about component parts. But that's to provide reassurance, so we can engage with the market. So we're repeatable design, just to make it easier and more standard. And in this changing world, there's a level of flexibility required, and we're building for the future, that's really important. But the care of the patients and the rigour around how these spaces will work, work together, work for staff, work for patients, is absolutely core to what we're doing.
'If I'm really honest, the ones that we're starting with are all the RAAC buildings, so the important areas are all in concrete, if I've got that right, and they are at risk of falling down, so therefore there is a sense of emergency. I think where we are building new homes obviously we'll always consider the restoration of other elements, but the programme is very focused on the new build and the transformation of the care pathways within that, and how the digital will work with the workforce. So it is quite focused.
'We want to build confidence - confidence politically in us to deliver and confidence in the construction market that we're a client, and confidence across the NHS that we can support and deliver and support that great patient care.'
Image: UCLH, adjacent to the Knowledge Quarter at Euston and King's Cross, and located in Bloomsbury - which Mace Group has worked on since 2010
New hospital programme - budget and risk
Mike Shaw, Director at Mace Consult and Design Lead for the New Hospital Programme, was asked to comment on whether 'one size could fit all' in construction. He responded:
'So the first focus is always on transformational therapies and what do we have to do to transform the way in which we deliver healthcare within this country.
'For some of the hospitals we're working on at the moment, it means not having buckets catching rain. It's as simple as that. What we've done is spend three years to try and work out what these key elements are. But at the same time, we've been talking to contractors, we've been talking to subcontractors and suppliers, because not everybody wants to build a hospital, as they're really quite complicated - while you can lose your Christmas bonus on a school, you can lose your company on a hospital, so talking to them at the same time, and trying to understand what were the key elements that would allow us to standardise, in order to bring them into the marketplace.
'So I think the first big roll out of the NHS hospital programme is an amazing piece of work because it's just so complicated. Most of the building forms that you work on you can set and embody it on operational carbon at that building level.. The complexities within the hospital mean that you have to split it down. And nobody's ever tried to do that before and make it measurable and consequently start to hold people to account to reduce the carbon both in everything that's invested within the production of it and within the operation. And those two things are roughly about 50-50%.
'Half your carbon goes into building and half of it goes into operating over 50 years. So we're just going to roll out of that and build that into the platform, the Hospital 2.0 platform, so that we've got a way of delivering that. Then as we lay it down, it's come in just to the point where we've got 10% for biodiversity. You can say it really quickly and it sounds really easy, but you tend to forget that traditionally a building will knock the biodiversity down by 70 or 80%. So bringing those two things together in the programme I think are going to be an enormous bonus for the way in which we insert sustainability in the environment.
'What we're trying to do with them is use them in the most efficient way we can and use them consistently so that when we go to a contracting market they can learn and reduce the amount of risk that they're putting into that hospital. Even a traditional - not a hospital - just a standard building carries about 15% of its budget as risk. So a billion pounds or 150 million pounds, which is just because people aren't sure what they're doing. In a hospital, I would suggest to use a little bit more than that. So the more that we can bring those notes down and focus on, not by the bricks and mortar, but focus it on the concrete and steel and focus it on using that concrete and steel to deliver a transformational healthcare system, that's the aim of the programme.'
The new hospital programme and RAAC:
James Schofield, Partner, Price and Myers, spoke to Future Cities Forum about the challenges and benefits of the hospital programme, for the work the consulting engineering practice is doing on hospitals such as the Royal Sussex and Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire:
' We've been looking at RAAC buildings for a number of years. We've found a lot of public buildings, hospitals, schools, higher education, libraries, theatres, buildings in the 60s and 70s contain RAAC. And obviously, there's a lot of concern I think. It was in 2018, that kick-started a lot of the investigation and assessment of buildings that have got RAAC.
'The new hospital programme includes seven hospitals, I think, that are predominantly RAAC. Hinchingbrooke, that you talked about, is one of them. West Suffolk is another. James Paget in Great Yarmouth. They're predominantly from RAAC-ruled panels, floor and roof panels. So what you tend to find in a lot of buildings is that there are RAAC panels on the roof, and it's perhaps easy to deal with those. But when you've got a building that's predominantly built from RAAC, then it's much harder to guarantee a future for longer than a certain number of years.
'But it's kind of a balancing act. Yes, obviously, it's great to have new hospitals that are going to replace these, but a lot of those are a long way off. If you can't just close a hospital that's serving a large community, there's a case for trying to maintain and strengthen these buildings so you can reuse them. That might mean some of them are 10, 15 years away.
'So I think it's a difficult process for a lot of those hospitals because they've got to do phased works, you know, for inspection, and being able to close a ward or a unit to allow it to be inspected is a challenge. Where do you move those departments to allow that? And what works needs to happen.? A lot of hospitals have got additional strengthening works that they've had to go in. Doing that, again, for the cleanliness, with noise, dust, is difficult. So there are big challenges, obviously, but we work closely with the estates teams to be able to phase that and work with them to enable those buildings to stay functioning.
'The drive to get buildings up quick back in the 1960s and 1970s, you know, that would have been a modern method of construction in those days. Everybody thought it was great, lightweight, quick. They wouldn't have known the future issues that were going to arise. And despite that, are the fact some of these buildings being listed.
'There are Brutalist Architecture buildings that are being listed. But I think as Katie said, we've got to look at new forms of construction, but building hospitals that have that flexibility. We've got to pick and choose what's the right project to use that and I think some of these sites can be a mixture.
'Perhaps we could do recovery centres, you know, care homes. It could be timber frames. It's a mixture of different materials for different uses. The NHS Guide for Net Zero talks about how to design it for flexibility, to be designed for every worst-case, and where there's a lot of embodied carbon there. Or do we try and look at how we design buildings that could be strengthened? So if you've got non-clinical and clinical, how do you make a non-clinical floor room? Clinical floor theatres need strict vibration, requirements, different loads, different services. So I think this is a bit of a step change there from us as designers thinking, can we design a building that could be strengthened easily if there was a change of use to prevent all of that extra carbon in there.?'
Image: Heatherwood Hospital - part of Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, courtesy of Buro Happold
Building sustainability into the new hospital programme
Oliver Blythe, structural engineer and Associate Director at Buro Happold, spoke to Future Cities Forum about ensuring sustainability while tackling carbon reduction targets:
'Speaking from my personal point of view as a structural engineer, in many ways, we got away with it for many years in terms of not having to build particularly sustainable buildings. The purpose was all on the energy. You know, reducing energy in these buildings.
'Just to come back to your point in terms of the flexibility, there is a contradiction at the heart of these things which we're always wrestling with, and that is, how do you design something now which is going to fit the purpose in 20 years? Do you invest now? Do you invest in infrastructure? Because you tend to be investing in carbon material. Now, do you do this to create a building which is flexible and robust and has the necessary capacity to allow for changing usage over time? And is it worth spending the materials and the carbon now to allow it to be fit for purpose in 25 years? And for me personally, that's always a yes, it has to be fit for purpose. It's a very good point now, design the buildings which are so stripped down to the bone now that the lifespan of these things is very limited.
'So, that's a contradiction which we're always wrestling with.. As designers, there's lots of talk about how we do this in the industry. We've got in the industry some embodied carbon targets. We've got a rolling set of targets which become more and more relevant each year, which we're trying to hit. We're doing okay at 2025 levels.
'My personal view is that we have to start looking at materials from Mars, I'm afraid. So, to a point, where it's appropriate, this is the thing we have to do. So, how are we going to make a step change? 25% is an enormous reduction in carbon. There's technological advancements happening all the time, especially in construction technology in terms of just concrete mix technology. How we fabricate, how we produce steel. The industry as a whole is reducing carbon all the time. But there still has to be a step change, really, if we're going to come in with these targets. And I think we need to be thinking a little bit broader in terms of construction methodologies and design.
'There's a reason why we're building in traditional ways still. It's low risk, it's well known, it's tendered on a competitive basis for a whole variety of contractors. Very good reasons why we're doing this. But we still need to think about a step change, I think, in terms of how we can help introduce new technologies into that process. Maybe it's something like composite materials or low carbon concretes. They are there, but they're not really available now on an industrial scale, which is what we really need.'
Image: courtesy of Squint/Opera
The hospital of the future
Buro Happold has also been carrying out research as part of an international design team, including OMA, and writing about the hospital of the future. It reports:
'Hospitals across the world face early obsolescence in the face of ever-changing demands and technological developments in healthcare. Recognising the hospital is in a constant state of flux, the project team set the challenge to develop a flexible facility, both from a structural, operational and servicing perspective. It will be able to expand, contract or transform as required on a much shorter planning cycle than the traditional hospital.
'The ambition is to realise a uniquely resilient hospital. Achieving this requires the typical hospital brief to be challenged, especially where these requirements seem at odds with a future world of scarce resources, vulnerable supply chains and market price volatility. The prototype is informed by multiple vulnerability assessments, considering everything from the hospital’s dependence on imports, to the impact of getting cut off from utilities and data connections.
'The wellbeing of staff and patients remains critical to the success of the Hospital. Today, across the whole healthcare system many staff are experiencing burnout. This is reducing staff wellbeing, creating shortages and in turn impacting the quality and efficiency of care provided. The prototype considers how existing and emerging technologies could support staff and reduce stress.
'We also found that while the hospital of today may be well-placed to efficiently treat a particular ‘malfunction’ within the body, they are often sterile environments that do not facilitate the wider healing of the mind and body. Our detailed microclimate analysis has succeeded in creating comfortable external courtyards that staff and patients can freely use throughout the seasons, encouraging healing through immersion in nature.
'The hospital of today is typically located in or close to major urban populations, on constrained sites with higher land values that require space to be utilised efficiently. We can imagine a future where technological advancement and new types of healthcare services mean the hospital does not need to be located in dense urban environments. The Hospital of the Future will be free of the constraints placed upon the hospital of today.
The prototype inverts the design of the traditional hospital. Instead of a medium-rise tower, we have flattened the building and placed patients on the ground floor, with clinical services above. This reconfiguration, based around a series of adjoining cross shaped modules, will immerse patients in the landscape and realise a far more relaxing, restorative environment.
To facilitate rapid adaptation, we have developed a kit of parts around an industrialised construction approach. The modular system divides the large floor plate of the hospital into four quadrants. Each of these contains four-bed wards on the ground floor, and a mix of treatment, diagnostic and support departments on the first floor. The quadrants are self-sufficient and able to operate as independent hospitals. Within each, the kit of parts enables each quadrant to be easily adapted to perform a new function.'.
Image: data centre, courtesy of Buro Happold
Energy policy, data centres and how digital is changing hospitals:
Mace Construct has been commenting at Future Cities Forum's 'Data Centres - strategy and sustainability' discussion event this past week, on the importance of properly connected data infrastructure for the new hospital programme. Director, John Jeffrey, said:
'I have designed hundreds of data centres with the ability to export heat but only done it once in Denmark. The UK doesn't have a joined up energy policy around data centres. Mace has been very invested in its work around the New Hospital Programme, so I ask the question, why hasn't the Government mandated data centres to provide free heating and cooling next to hospitals. In the UK we have very few heat networks compared to Scandinavia. In the Mace project in Denmark we export over 50 megawatts of heat to the community in a joined up economic and energy plan. The Government talks about new towns and their extensions so they should be putting data centres at the heart of communities. This is missed in UK policy.
A report from The Technical University of Denmark and the Cool-Data project, sheds light on the possibilities for utilizing flexibility and waste heat from data centres.
In the project Cool-Data a team of researchers from DTU (DTU Compute, DTU Construct, and DTU Management), together with four companies and a utility, work on developing and implementing an innovative integrated cooling and storage system adapted for small and medium-sized data centres (up to 500 servers). The cooling process produces a lot of heat that could be used in the surrounding energy system.
Associate Professor, Claire Marie Bergaentzle, DTU Management and Researcher Dominik Franjo Dominkovic, DTU Compute, The Techical University of Denmark, have been looking at the reasons why data centres are viewed as being helpful to district heating:.
'Small and medium data centres have significant advantages for providing waste heat to district heating. The most important benefit is their location: they are usually located close to existing networks, greatly reducing potential network extension investments and transmission losses and thereby improving their waste heat's cost-competitiveness.
'Additionally, waste heat from small data centres can be recovered even in district heating networks covering a small area, without the district heating company risking a significant part of its supply on a single facility. Finally, data centres with a heat output lower than 250 kW are exempt from price regulation, allowing more flexibility during their negotiation with the district heating company.
'The importance of smaller data centres in the energy system is also reflected in the EU Energy Efficiency Directive revision, which is part of the Fit for 55 package. This revision originally mandated new data centres larger than 1 MW to perform a cost-benefit analysis for waste-heat recovery, including its use in district heating systems. However, an amendment has been recently approved to include data centres larger than 100 kW, highlighting smaller data centre's potential contribution to European energy security.
'Another even greater benefit from small and medium size data centres is that they can often utilize their waste heat directly in the commercial building(s) where it is located, which is even more efficient than utilizing the waste heat in a district heating grid. Contrary to big data centres, they are often located in commercial buildings.
'
Until 2021, the regime that regulated waste-heat suppliers hindered the participation of small participants; they were subject to the same budget notifications and price verification requirements as district heating companies. These requirements added administrative burdens and costs that adversely selected small suppliers. Additionally, the previous tax on waste-heat recovery further limited the cases in which its recovery would be economically feasible.
'The new regulation in place since 2022 has passed the administrative burden to the district heating companies, which have the tools and expertise to handle it. It has also removed the tax on waste heat produced from electricity, effectively removing data centres' main barriers to providing heat. Some time is required to observe more data centres recovering waste heat, as these regulatory developments are quite recent.
'Furthermore, established practice is missing on who should actually handle the waste heat, especially when we need to add heat pumps to the system (in order to raise the waste heat temperature). It is not clear if the operator should be the data centre owner or the district heating company, and who should invest in heat pumps.'
Future Cities Forum would like to thank all participants contributing to this report.
APPENDIX
The New Hospital Programme Annual Report 2025 to 2026 - published in July 2026 (under the Starmer Labour government) reported on the funding for the hospitals in wave 1, and this includes seven hospitals affected by the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete - RAAC - crisis.
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