Nursing home upgrade shelved after States underestimate cost by £1m

Wednesday 28 November 2018

A care home that hasn't been refurbished in nearly 20 years was denied crucial improvements because the States underestimated the cost by over £1million, it has emerged.

In 2014, £1.25million was set aside to upgrade Sandybrook nursing home, which has been providing residential care for older people since 1999.

Those upgrades would have included modernising bathrooms, new flooring, door replacements, refreshing the whole interior and exterior of the building, as well as installing a sprinkler system as per Fire Service requirements.

But new documents released under the Freedom of Information (FOI) law have shown that the full estimated cost of carrying out these upgrades was over a million more than initially expected.

Pictured: Sandybrook hasn't been upgraded since it was opened in 1999. 

Last month the Treasury Minister, Deputy Susie Pinel, came under criticism for placing the original £1.2million back into a central pot because it hadn’t been spent in four years. 

Deputy Pinel was grilled over the move before a panel of politicians at the time, with the Chair, Senator Kristina Moore, stating that the money withdrawal had caused “considerable concern” among the home’s residents, who were said to “feel very keenly that it is the last publicly-owned facility of its kind”. 

In response, the States’ Director for Financial Planning and Performance noted that bids had been allowed to go through the States capital programme “without sufficient robust business cases behind them" under the previous administration.

Pictured: The upgrades to Sandybrook would have included a sprinkler system.

Minutes of meetings and reports related to the Sandybrook project released under the FOI Law have now shown the impact of that problem.

According to the documents, by April this year, the overall budget for the project was reported to have stood at £1.7million – but the estimated costs were over one million more than originally thought. 

Main contract works alone were said to be £1.8million, with other project works at £70,000, non-descript “fees” at 376,968 and “other sundry costs at 73,040”. Together this totalled £2.3million. 

As a result, the report noted that the project was “essentially on hold”, stating: “In summary, the original budget appears to be understated to afford the required scope of the work.”  

It added: “To progress this project, a minimum of £636K additional funding is required.”