New Royal Liverpool Hospital: major work needed before patients and staff can move in

The new Royal Liverpool Hospital should have opened more than two years ago.

Many areas seem near completion.

But other parts of the building appear to be a construction site.

The new facility was thought to be around 90% completed when builders Carillion went out of business last year.

But it has now been found that there were issues in the original build, meaning a huge scheme of intervention work is now required by new builders Laing O'Rourke.

It's emerged that while the building is not dangerous, it is structurally flawed.

It will take millions of pounds to put those faults right.

The structural interventions will require over 220 cubic metres of new concrete and 165 tons of new fabricated steelwork.

In some areas furnishings will have to be ripped out from wards.

To create access for the transport of materials like concrete and steelwork into the building, some of the cladding and exterior of the building will be also be removed.

This adds another major issue - with the fear that expensive new equipment already in place could be damaged when the inside of the building is open to the elements.

Click here for video update on the new Royal Liverpool Hospital

The timescale for those changes will certainly be months, possibly longer, before patients and staff can move from the old building into the new one.

Questions have been raised about what happened, who was to blame and what to do about the spiralling costs involved in the project.