Mental Health Trusts Sitting on £3 Trillion Land Assets, NHS England Chair Claims
NHS England chair Penny Dash provoked significant controversy by claiming during a review panel session that mental health trusts across England collectively hold land assets worth approximately £3 trillion, citing the figure in the context of her questioning of whether the sector could genuinely argue it lacked the financial resources to improve service quality and productivity. The claim was immediately contested by mental health service providers and charities, who argued that the valuation was misleading and that land assets cannot simply be liquidated to fund day-to-day service provision.
Dash, who was appointed to chair the NHS England board and is leading a review into productivity in mental health services, made the remarks during evidence sessions that were subsequently reported by the Health Service Journal. She described mental health services as being characterised by “high building, high estate, low utilisation” — implying that the physical assets of the sector were disproportionate to the number of patients they served and that rationalisation could release capital for service improvement.
Mental health trust chief executives and the Royal College of Psychiatrists responded by arguing that many of the historic assets counted in such valuations are Victorian-era buildings with significant maintenance liabilities, require specific regulatory consent to dispose of, and cannot be sold without either closing services or replacing them in facilities that would themselves cost significant sums. The argument that paper land values translate into available cash was described as fundamentally flawed by financial directors in the sector.
Mental health charities also noted that the context for the claim was a government decision to abandon the requirement for the share of NHS spending going to mental health to increase year-on-year — a protection known as the mental health investment standard that had been one of the few structural guarantees of resource allocation for a sector that has historically struggled to compete with acute services for funding priority.
