Affordable homes due to be built beside new Hythe hospital

New Forest District Council is forging ahead with plans to buy part of the site being used to provide a new Hythe and Dibden War Memorial Hospital.

The new homes, which were given outline planning permission in 2018, will be built on surplus land that the NHS will sell to the council.

The cabinet member for housing, Cllr Jill Cleary, and the member for finance, Cllr Jeremy Heron, have signed off a legal agreement to acquire the freehold interest in the land. An updated planning application is due to be submitted soon.

It comes three years after the council vowed to deliver at least 600 new affordable homes for rent and shared ownership by 2026.

Work on the new state-of-the-art hospital began last summer and is likely to be completed in June.

A diagnostics suite will boast a brand new X-ray machine as well as offering ultrasound in line with a national drive to deliver more services at a community level.

A mobile breast screening unit will continue to visit the site. Health chiefs are also working on plans to send other mobile units to the hospital as well, including MRI and CT scanners.

Hampshire, Southampton and Isle of Wight Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is working closely with clinical health services.

In a statement issued last year the CCG said: "The new hospital will continue to be an important community facility.

"The building will be the third ‘Hythe and Dibden War Memorial Hospital’ and plans are being put in place for a formal dedication service to reflect its special status."

The previous hospital was built more than a century ago.

In 2010 a survey revealed that the buildings “required major repairs or replacement, were in very poor condition and were functionally unacceptable”.

Proposals to build a new hospital on the 1.57-hectare site in Beaulieu Road, Hythe, were approved by health chiefs in 2014, when the cost was put at £5m.

Planning permission for the scheme was granted by the district council in 2018.