Costly mistake that’s crippling our hospitals

‘Can I have a biscuit please?’ asked Mrs McMahon, who was in hospital after a nasty fall. I relayed her request to the nursing staff. ‘Don’t fancy your chances,’ replied one, frowning. ‘We’ve had some problems with biscuits, you see.’

‘a sandwich then?’ I ventured. The nurse just laughed.

at the time, I was working at one of the country’s first large- scale PFI (private finance initiative) hospitals. Under the PFI scheme, building projects and certain services are run by private companies, which the nHS then rents back off them.

The PFI scheme, which took off under new Labour in the early 2000s, was celebrated because it meant the government avoided having to spend money on buildings and maintenance, and could give the responsibility of paying the PFI companies to the hospital trusts.

But the scheme wasn’t all it purported to be: it was utter rubbish. One such PFI ‘service’ within the hospital where I was working was catering. The private company responsible for this insisted on locking the pantries on the ward to prevent ‘unauthorised consumption’.

Each hospital has its own contracts and arrangements, so another might have 24- hour access to biscuits, but no afterhours IT support, for example.

The nursing staff and I were so mortified that we couldn’t provide Mrs McMahon with anything to eat, that one enterprising nurse walked to the nearest petrol station on her break and bought Mrs McMahon a packet of Hobnobs with her own money. PFI doesn’t work for patients — or for the nHS. For not only is it grossly inefficient and restrictive, it is also very costly.

With PFI, all we end up doing is paying inflated prices for sub- standard services in order to provide healthy profit margins for private companies. Meanwhile, hospitals have been crippled by repayments.

Sherwood Forest nHS trust, for example, is spending 15 per cent of its entire annual budget on a PFI loan. Barts and the Royal London in East London currently pays more than £2 million a week in interest.

It’s bonkers, and I’ve been campaigning about this for years. now it seems that finally someone is listening. Unfortunately, it’s Jeremy Corbyn, of whom I’m no fan.

This week, at the Labour Party conference, Mr Corbyn pledged to address PFI by buying our way out of the contracts.

But this would be phenomenally expensive. Instead, we should centralise all the PFI debt.

at present, certain hospitals are crippled with debt, while others are not. This is unfair. Centralising the debt will mean it can be taken from the overall nHS budget.

But most importantly, it will mean that by putting all the debt under one roof, as it were, the Government will be in a much better bargaining position to get the best possible repayment deal for the taxpayer. It will be far more effective — and cheaper — than individual hospitals trying to do this.

PFI was a hideous, costly mistake. We have to put this right.