HEALTH bosses have stressed that the sale of land earmarked for a £300 million new North-East hospital does not mean that the project has been shelved for good.

Officials from the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust were commenting on the news that the multi-million pound site at Wynyard which was earmarked for a new ‘super-hospital' is being sold back to the owners, Wynyard Park Limited.

Despite the decision, officials from the North Tees and Hartlepool trust say they still believe a new hospital in the Wynyard area would be the best way forward for the area - despite calls from campaigners for more services to be returned to Hartlepool hospital and more investment in the North Tees hospital at Stockton.

The decision to sell the land back to the owners is related to the fine print of the original land sale agreement signed between Wynyard Park Limited and the North Tees and Hartlepool Trust back in 2010.

The sale of the site – which was to become a new ‘super-hospital’ replacing the ageing facilities at the University Hospital of North Tees and the University Hospital of Hartlepool – had a number of conditions, including being able to secure funding to build the new hospital.

But last October trust bosses confirmed that they were putting the plans for a new hospital at Wynyard on hold until after the General Election because of lack of progress.

The Wynyard hospital project got the go-ahead under the previous Labour Government and was supposed to be open this year.

But the incoming Coalition Government decided the scheme was too expensive and cancelled the project. Since then the trust has been trying to secure Government support for a slimmed-down, cheaper version of the new hospital.

This process was suspended until after the election after what the trust described as a lack of “high-level” political support.

In the last few years more and more acute services have been removed from the Hartlepool site and centralised on the North Tees site in Stockton because of the need to pool medical manpower and keep services safe.

Alan Foster, chief executive of the North Tees and Hartlepool, said: “The trust has a land sale agreement with Wynyard Park Limited, which has an option for the trust to sell the land back to Wynyard Park Limited if the trust cannot satisfy the conditions of the land sale agreement, the main one being having started work on site.

“The trust is exercising the option to sell the land back to Wynyard Park Limited, which we have to do by May 12.”