INVESTIGATES HOW WE PAY BLEEDING Trusts paying highest PFI fees
Repayments for Royal London Hospital * Deficit/surplus figures are for 2017/18 year to date as of December 2017
keep borrowing off the books. A lot of money that should have been spent on patient care has now gone. “PFI deals are toxic. They are crippling the NHS and we have to deal with the problem right Eventual cost of revamping King’s Mill Hospital, Notts
now.” Ms Creasy wants to see a windfall tax on PFI companies to recover taxpayers’ money.
She said: “It comes down to political will. The government needs to say to the PFI companies, ‘Either get round a table and renegotiate the contracts or we are going to slap you with a tax’.”
Research by the Centre for Health and the Public Interest shows firms that have built NHS hospitals under PFI made pre-tax profits of £831million between 2010 and 2015.
The CHPI found that if the NHS had not been paying profits on PFI schemes, deficits in NHS hospitals would have been reduced by a quarter between 2010 and 2015.
Normally around 40 per cent of PFI charges relate to the cost of running services at the new hospitals such as cleaning, catering and portering. But these contracts were badly negotiated and have not proved cost effective. Vivek Kotecha, a research officer at CHPI, said: “When Barts Health NHS Trust managed to negotiate to remove these services from its PFI contract it managed to save millions of pounds.
“But most of the contracts don’t allow you to get out of it, which means hospitals are trapped.”
A Tory health spokesman said: “It’s true the NHS is still dealing with the costs of Labour’s PFI debts from their last time in office – just like they plan to saddle our country with huge debts if they ever get into power again.”
PFI deals are toxic. They are crippling the NHS and we have to deal with the problem STELLA CREASY LABOUR MP CALLING FOR A TAX ON PFI FIRMS