The comments came yesterday during evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee.

Lord Hutton told MPs: ‘We can either continue with the New Hospital Programme in a way that's been set out. And the analysis that we've done in the association indicates at best we might get 45 hospitals built over the next 25 years. In the 10 years of PFI we built 90 hospitals over 10 years so that's twice the output over half a period of time.

‘This is your choice -  if we don't deploy private capital you're going to all have to wait probably twice as long for the hospital your constituents need.'

The Government announced at the last Budget that it would allow PPPs to be re-introduced into the health sector to build new neighbourhood health centres, but has so far refused to allow the same to be done to accelerate hospital building, following the moratorium introduced in 2018.