Wakefield Council could step in to save Clayton Hospital

Councillors claimed they “could not sit back for much longer” and watch the building fall further into disrepair at a meeting on Wednesday.

The site on Northgate, has been boarded up since Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust moved services out of the building in 2012.

Since then it has been a target for vandals.

Coun Denise Jeffery, the council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for regeneration, said: “We can’t sit back much longer as a council and see it fall into disrepair.

“I do intend to speak to officers to see what action we can take to move the plans forward.

“I am determined that we do something about the Clayton Hospital site.”

The council has identified the former hospital as one of a number of derelict sites across the district it will look at to see if it can regenerate them.

Coun Graham Isherwood, chairman of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee, said his committee would produce a report on a number of neglected sites across the district.

He said: “These sites are pulling our regeneration hopes down.

“Hopefully we can help to address that problem.”

Wakefield North councillor Elizabeth Rhodes said she had spoken to Mid Yorkshire Hospital’s NHS Trust chief executive Stephen Eames about the site.

She told the meeting: “I have been made aware that there has been some discussions going on as to the future of the site and I did hope it would have come to fruition sooner rather than later.

“God forbid that somebody would get hurt on that site.”

Clayton Hospital has been derelict since the last NHS services were moved out three years ago.

The hospital was founded in 1854 and was named after Thomas Clayton, a former city mayor and wealthy philanthropist, donated buildings to the Wakefield General Dispensary, an organisation set up to provide healthcare for the poor.

It provided much needed healthcare for the city long before the NHS was formed.

After 1948 it became part of the newly-formed National Health Service and NHS services were provided there until 2012.

It has been plagued by vandalism since its closure.