Crumbling hospitals and other NHS buildings in Sussex need repairs costing a staggering £69 million.

Health minister John Hutton said the figure was just the bill for making buildings "physically sound, operationally safe and exhibiting only minor deterioration".

The Department of Health said it showed the need for huge investment in the county's hospitals, GP surgeries and clinics during the next decade.

The total needed to get East Sussex health authority buildings up to scratch stands at almost £19 million. In West Sussex it is £50 million.

Brighton Health Care NHS Trust has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on improvements to its hospitals but said it needed to spend millions more.

Steps already taken include plans to transfer the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Sick Children from Dyke Road to a new site at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Eastern Road.

Some of the buildings at the Royal Alex are more than 100 years old.

Parts of Brighton General Hospital were built in the 19th Century and are increasingly expensive to maintain.

A trust spokesman said: "Some of these buildings were not designed to cope with 21st Century medical care and some are showing the strain.

"We are constantly having to deal with problems such as crumbling plaster and leaking roofs."

In West Sussex, parts of the Southlands Hospital building in Shoreham are 100 years old and constantly need money spent on them to keep them up to standard.

A hospital spokesman said: "It is a constant problem and a continuous drain on resources."

The statistics were for March 2000, the last year for which figures are available, and were published in a Commons written reply to Liberal Democrat health spokesman Evan Harris.

Dr Harris said: "The large cost of putting these hospitals right is a direct result of under-investment in the NHS for decades."

A Health Department spokesman said: "The whole health service infra-structure is suffering from decades of neglect and these figures show that.

"We are working to address this problem and carrying out the biggest hospital rebuilding programme in the history of the NHS."