PLANS for a superhospital at Hatfield, due to be built by 2013, have been scrapped.

Health bosses from the East of England Strategic Health Authority and the Hertfordshire Primary Care Trust made the announcement today (Friday) at a press conference in Welwyn Garden City.

The hospital and additional cancer centre would have been built on former British Aerospace land in Hatfield and served the St Albans population.

However, the PCT said while it supported the principle of centralising acute hospital services in east and north Hertfordshire on a single site, the Hatfield proposal was not viable.

instead the trust will consider centralising at either the Lister in Stevenage or the Queen Elizabeth II (QEII) in Welwyn Garden City.

The trust's chairman, Richard Beazley, said: "Over the past three years, our staff - along with their colleagues elsewhere in the NHS and many from the community - have worked exceptionally hard to develop plans for the proposed new hospital in Hatfield.

"Today's news, therefore, will be greeted with disappointment by us all. However, we have to be realistic. Much has changed since July 2004 when the Hatfield project received the support of the then health secretary, Dr John Reid, with perhaps the biggest change being the highly challenged financial positions of virtually all the NHS organisations in Hertfordshire.

"The challenge facing the trust now is to accept the decision and to develop new proposals that will still allow us to deliver the vision set out in Investing in your Health - high-quality specialist acute services in modern facilities that allow our clinical staff to offer better and sustainable standards of care than is the case today."

Nick Carver, the trust's chief executive, said: "I know that many of our staff, as well as the public, will feel very disappointed by this development.

"We must not lose sight, however, of the fact that the underlying principles of Investing in your Health - more patients having routine treatments in facilities closer to where they live and consolidation of specialist acute services on fewer, but bigger hospital sites - remains in place."

News that the superhospital would be scrapped followed weeks of speculation about the project's future.

The superhospital, which would have been funded by private investors, had already been downgraded from £500million to £300million, and doubts had been voiced over the affordability of the specialist cancer centre.

Welwyn Hatfield MP Grant Shapps, who received the news from primary care trust chiefs at the Houses of Parliament yesterday, said he was "angry and dismayed".

He said: "This is really simple, we've been completely betrayed by this government. They came here and announced in a fanfare of publicity that a new superhospital would be built at Hatfield when the former Labour MP - who happened to be a Government health minister - was narrowly clinging onto her seat.

"Then after they lost the election we have lost our proposed hospital. It's a form of punishment to the people of Welwyn Hatfield for having the audacity not to have voted Labour and it amounts to the most blatant politicisation of our NHS we have ever seen. It's completely outrageous."

Mr Shapps says he plans to launch a campaign, Hospital SOS, to try to force health bosses to have a change of heart.

He said: "With the Government indicating that our surrounding population must grow by some 66,000 by 2021, the idea that we somehow don't need an acute general hospital in Welwyn Garden City is insane.

"In the past the prospect of a new super-hospital at Hatfield meant that objections to closures at the QEII were somewhat muted, but now Hatfield has been shelved I hope that the entire community will club together and force a rethink before lives are lost by what can only be described as politically motivated insanity."

The PCTs will now further work to test several options, prior public consultation starting in early 2007 on the future of hospital services across Hertfordshire.