It was Blair who broke the NHS

WES STREETING MP, Secretary of State for Health, has announced that the NHS is “broken” – and he has a Baldrick-style “Cunning Plan” to mend it. What Streeting hasn’t confessed is that it wasn’t the Tories who broke the NHS during their 14 years in office – it was the Blair/Brown Government before that.

This has now been confirmed by research published by the pro-public services website We Own It. Yes, Blair and Brown (first as Chancellor and then as Prime Minister) commissioned lots of repairs and refurbishments to hospital buildings – and even a number of new hospitals. But almost all of these were funded by Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals: a way to channel public money into the private sector.

Although the hospitals came quickly, they were expensive. NHS budgets are still paying back the loans which funded the builds. Worse, NHS Trusts did not run the new hospitals: they were tied into costly deals with the companies that built them. If the NHS is short of money now, it is often because Trusts are still saddled with the costs of PFI.

If you find all this hard to believe, just consider the headlines in the We Own It research.

Cost to the NHS
•NHS Trusts have paid back, on average, over three and a half times what they borrowed.
•NHS Trusts still owe £605 million on average.
•The 80 NHS Trusts which have PFI deals owe £44 billion between them.
•Of the 78 Trusts which have paid back the original capital they borrowed, 60 could clear their entire repairs backlog with the money they still owe because of the terms of the PFI deals.

How private companies have benefited
•NHS Trusts in England which stil have a PFI debt have paid back an average of just under eight times the initial PFI capital put into their Trusts. That’s a huge return on investment or the private companie that entered these deals.
•Nearly all (78 out of 80) NHS Trusts which signed up to PFI deals have already paid off the initial capital investment, but the terms of the deals mean they are still shovelling public money into private companies.
•The Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust has the worst payback ration: it is paying back 27 times the capital it originally borrowed. East London is not far behind.

What’s it like in East London?
•The East London NHS Foundation Trust is fifth highest: its contract, running from June 2002 to April 2036, will see the Trust paying £213 million on a capital investment of £15 million (a payback ratio of 14 time the loan).
•The Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust is in 18th place. Under a contract running from November 2006 to January 2040, it is paying the private companies £2.6 billion in return for their loan of £266 million (a payback ratio of ten).
•The North East London NHS Foundation Trust is down in 30th place. Their contract, running between March 2002 and March 2032, will see them pay back £83.3 million in return for an £11 million investment.
•Barts Health NHS Trust is way down in 46th place. Their contract runs from June 2006 to April 2048 and will see them pay back £7.1 billion in return for a loan of £1.2 billion. That’s a massive sum, but they are down at number 46 because that is “only” a six-times payback ration.

So let’s not do any more PFI, right?
Wrong. Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP is facing the challenge of how to cut waiting lists. One of the options he is considering is getting NHS Trusts to sign new PFI deals with private healthcare companies. The deals could go far beyond providing buildings. The deals being considered would allow the private companies to provide the extra healthcare needed to cut waiting lists. Streeting could get waiting lists down, and there would not be an immediate cost – which would be handy, as Chancellor Rachel Reeves isn’t going to up his budget significantly. But, just as with the Blair/Brown funding deals on buildings, we would all be saddled with paying back private companies huge treatment fees – with interest – for generations to come.

●We Own It are collecting signatures to send in to Wes Streeting, asking him to spend money on NHS medical treatment rather than the profits of private companies. Sign it here:
Tell West Streeting, NO NE PFI in our NHS

●For more information, go to:
We Own It

●Read more about it:
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