ROOF REFURBISHMENT
Roof refurbishment: a Net Zero opportunity
Getting onto a hospital roof is expensive even before the work begins. Leon Shead, head of Langley Renewables, shares why that single fact should determine the order in which an estates team does things.
A hospital will not close so you can work on it. That single fact sets the economics of
everything that happens up there. Before a square metre of waterproofing goes down, you have paid for scaffold and edge protection, craneage, permits, night and weekend shifts, and somebody’s afternoon explaining to a ward sister why there is banging above her patients. On a live acute site, all of that can come close to the cost of the work itself. Which leads down only one path once you acknowledge that fact: if access is the expensive part, buy it once. And while you are up there, do every job that roof needs – waterproofing, insulation, solar. One visit, one plan. It rarely works out that way, and not because anyone is careless. Roof refurbishment and solar come out of different budgets, on different timescales, pushed by different people answering to different targets. One is a maintenance liability. The other is a carbon commitment. They land on the same deck and nobody planned for them to. What follows takes them in the order the building needs them. The roof first, then what goes on top of it.
What it looks like when the sequencing works Milton Keynes University Hospital is the clearest example I can point to.
It is a 550 bed acute site, live throughout, with flat roofs
over the original hospital buildings that were well past their serviceable life. The Trust ran it as a phased programme rather than a single project. Roofs were surveyed, graded, and sequenced, and each phase carried the full scope: new waterproofing, insulation to current standards, PV, edge protection, and permanent access. A five year maintenance check scheme sits behind it and a 25 year insurance backed guarantee. Phasing matters more than it sounds. It lets a Trust match spend to the capital it can actually see in a given year while still working to a single plan, so the work does not fragment into unrelated projects with different specifications and different guarantees. And it means the roofs in the worst condition get dealt with first, rather than the ones that happen to fall inside a particular budget line or sit above the department with the loudest voice.
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge shows what
the survey stage decides. Four roof areas above working wards had reached the end of their service life, and on the surface, they made a strong case for four strip-outs. The protective chippings had migrated off the felt, leaving the bitumen exposed to UV, brittle and cracking, with reinforcement visible in places. Patch repairs had built up in three different materials. Falls were inadequate, so water and debris sat rather than drained, and outlets were blocked and missing their leaf guards. Thermally, the four areas sat between 0.39 and 0.52 W/m²K. The core samples said something different. The build-up below the waterproofing was sound across all four areas, so all four were primed and overlaid rather than stripped, with tapered insulation to correct the falls and bring the thermal performance up. No roof waste went to landfill. Two things about how it ran are worth knowing. It
took roughly six months above working wards, and the wards below never had to stop. And the appointed contractor entered administration partway through. The works were completed by a replacement contractor and the guarantee position held, because the guarantee sat with the manufacturer and its insurer rather than with the contractor’s own trading position.
October 2026 Health Estate Journal 103
The roof at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
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