Sick Kids cash

I agree with Fraser Grant (Letters, August 14) in his criticism of the Labour Party for indulging in the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model to fund public projects. However, what the SNP have put in its place – Non-profit Distributing, surely a misnomer – only has the virtue of being less bad. The £150 million Sick Kids hospital is to cost the Scottish taxpayer at least £432m and likely to rise to well above £500m. That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the SNP’S use of taxpayers’ money.

Mr Grant is on even shakier ground when he claims that the SNP cannot “give £14m to a company”. They ares currently shelling out £1.4m a month to a company for a hospital which cannot be used! And he may be forgetting that the SNP has handed out £40m to Prestwick airport and similarly “loaned” £45m to Ferguson Marine, a company which is either going to go to the wall

or to be taken into public ownership by the SNP. How much of that outlay does Mr Grant expect to be recovered?

These are only two cases which will cost the taxpayer dearly as a result of SNP involvement. How many hundreds of millions have been squandered on botched computer systems for example?

Mr Grant complains of “limited borrowing powers”. My

grasp of public finance may be inadequate but I find it hard to understand the need to borrow £150m to build a hospital. The SNP has been routinely presiding over annual underspends in the region of £400m to £500m! We are informed that such figures are a tiny fraction of total public spending. Maybe so. But if £400m is such a pittance then how does it make sense to baulk at

stumping up £150m upfront for a major NHS project? Does it make any sense?

It is high time that the SNP lived up to its rhetoric and ditched entirely a model of funding which is designed to safeguard the profits of shareholders whilst disregarding the interests of taxpayers.

COLIN HAMILTON Braid Hills Avenue, Edinburgh