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Let your next career move come to you.

It was Labour that broke the NHS

The £13bn of private sector-funded investment that Blair sorted out out for new hospitals will end up costing the NHS in England  £80bn. 

Some trusts are having to spend as much as one-sixth of their entire budget on repaying debts due as a result of the PFI scheme!

 

but the Tories will sell it to Donald Trump....

Sherwood Forest trust in Nottinghamshire has a £326m PFI deal that costs it £50.3m a year in repayments and eats up the largest proportion of its budget of any trust – 16.51%

but that nice junior Dr thinks Boris is a aunt... 

 

yes yes yes

the tories had no role whatsoever in PFI, yes yes

80bn quid is, in any event, about 0.4% per year of GDP over the time it will be paid off.

Well worth it to renew the capital plant and facilities of the NHS, dangerously degraded under the thatcher and major administrations. If individual trusts are struggling with “debt” then the solution is to scrap the ludicrous internal market divisions that pretends local hospitals are, or should be, independent economic units, and just take the debt into the DH balance sheet.

Yes Boz is a aunt. 

 

All the above deals were done by Labour m7. 

you miss the point, on purpose, that this 80 billion coming our of NHS budgets that is not being spend on the NHS but paid to private companies. 

hth

It would be lovely if the comments on PFI deals could occasionally come from someone who had actually read a PFI deal and knows what it is and how it works.  
 

British politics at the moment is a dialogue of deaf chimps flinging dung at one another.  

hospitals cost money to build however you build them m88, you can’t just magic them up with magic bean dust

and they needed building m88

The physical plant of the NHS really matters - acute healthcare is an industrial business - and it wa sin a fooking state in 1997. 

Yes m7.  The Government has a lot of money. 

It can afford to build the hospitals. 

Rather than spending the money in his government Blair moved the vast and insane debts to cripple the NHS under future governments so he could pretend he was not breaking the economy. 

 

HTH

 

if the government can afford it, it can afford it however it’s dressed up. And I agree: it can afford it, because the cost is fairly piffling relative to GDP. At its worst, you’ve just said, it’s 16.75% of the turnover of a few specific troubled bits of the NHS. What other industrial business has capital plant amortisation costs as low as that?

if your point is just that it’s unhelpful to pretend individual hospitals are individually accountable for their specific debts, rather than seeing the whole cost at system level, then I agree it’s optically unhelpful. I’ve always agreed that the internal market (invented by the tories, of course) is a sham. But at the end of the day all that really matters is whether the british state can afford the aggregate cost, and it can. And if a different financing structure had been used, any cost savings would have been utterly marginal.

 

Also, if government was motivated to disguise the precise amount and location of the build cost for the near total renewal of the physical infrastructure of Our NHS, then that wa a probably a political necessity because voters are too much of a bunch of miserly aunts to have voted for it if told the true cost up front.

It needed doing, we could afford to do it, they (successive governments including the Tory ones since 2010 who have still been doing PFI/PPP) got it done. I’m right behind it, Well done them 

Little baby jesus needs his nappy changing mate, off you pop

Laz any other industrial business is able to factor the cost of buildings into the price it charges its customers.  If it can't afford those buildings and remain competitive it will often look to sell them and move before it becomes insolvent.

The trouble with PFI was that there was no rental market for hospitals so a couple of surveyors got together and extrapolated from another industry and came up with a figure that was clearly too high to be affordable but nobody in the NHS or government seemed to notice.

The biggest problem with PFI is that there's an emotional argument because they named it poorly.

Private Finance Initiative sounds like some sort of privatisation and the public have been tabloid-conditioned to hate that. 

if they called it the "Bankers take the risk associated with renewing shitty infrastructure, meaning government borrowing (which is always subject to limitations) can be deployed on other things Finance Initiative" we'd likely have a different view.

All I can say is:

State hospitals in the UK when I was a kid - shite

State hospitals in the UK today - very rarely shite and often very good. There is overcapacity, because much of what the DH commissioned turned out to exceed actual need (University Hospital Durham, which my dad built*, is an example of this) but that does mean that pressure on facilities and infrastructure is reduced and they don’t degrade as quickly

The NHS isn't broken it is underfunded.   Once we get funding on healthcare back up to G7 average all will be well.   It is the most affordable and efficient system of healthcare yet devised for a developed nation so if the NHS is fooked healthcare worldwide is fooked.

Although I agree PFI was a financial mistake and I opposed it at the time but probably politically calculated as the most realistic way of funding new hospitals without scaring the horses.

word

bitching about PFI as the reason services are underfunded is retarded

If services are underfunded it’s because our to if taxnimby voter culture means we spend about 3% of GDP less on healthcare than all peer nations do.

If it weren’t for the new labour building programme, which would have cost much the same however funded, the services, whatever their nature and quantum of funding, would be being delivered in a garden shed. Now grow the fook up.

PFI isn't a mortgage and includes build costs and services (with a risk transfer). The recent collapse of Carillion and Interserve reflects, in part, how much risk transfer went on. 

The only point that really needed making in response to the turd of an OP was the one Guy eventually got round to making: the NHS isn’t broken now jog the fook on.

At least two people posting on this profess to believe that PFI payments are all a matter of capital repayment.  
 

Just to stop the outright lying, PFI payments are made for availability.  Availability means you have to build the hospital, equip it, maintain it and generally keep it going according to a very precise schedule of requirements.  The monthly payment is part capital repayment and part maintenance and part operational cost.  As PFI contractor you are at risk the whole time - if something isn’t available in the sense required by the contract at the time in question you don’t get paid even if you paid to build that thing.  
 

Now if anyone has anything sensible to say about PFI (and its a complex if utterly tedious topic) get it out on the table.......

BUT PLEASE STOP LYING !!!!

It is the usual Tory pattern - starve the nhs of funds and then say the model needs changing - ignoring the fact that the model delivers more for less than any other model 

I have always thought the main problem with PFI is that government as a whole ( incl civil servants as well as ministers) just dont understand business and get held over a barrel. Gordon Brown has a lot to answer for.

" without scaring the horses" = having a future government have to deal with the huge costs we have crippled them with and then try to blame them for it, you mean. 

 

The government took a while to get up the learning curve but by say 2007/2008 they had the whip hand and contractors seem to have taken a pasting since then. 

The ongoing payments include running a service not just build costs

??? not someone who works in business I assume - maybe do you work at Pret or something?

cos this is a clanger

hotnow26 Nov 19 11:54

“The ongoing payments include running a service not just build costs”

This is correct.  The payments are for availability which includes building the asset, maintaining the asset and a range of operational services like cleaning, changing lightbulbs, ensuring heating and medical gas supplies work etc.  The precise mix varies and is specified in exhaustive detail in each contract.  

PFI is not like a mortgage.  

PS: - 

 

“This timely and shocking IPPR report highlights the huge waste of taxpayers’ money from paying off PFI debts that are crippling the NHS and could be much better spent on patient care,” said Dr John Puntis, a retired paediatrician who is co-chair of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public.

“All trust debts should be wiped clean by the Treasury, and contracts renegotiated and brought back into public ownership on grounds of poor value. The premise of PFI that the private sector is more efficient in delivering and managing infrastructure projects has repeatedly been shown to be false,” he added.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/12/nhs-hospital-trusts-to-pay-out-further-55bn-under-pfi-scheme

 

HTH

 

I remember looking at a lot of these back in the day (2002-2005 or so).

 

If you stepped back and assigned a normal interest rate (for that type of counterparty) to the property lease element (ie the DBF part), and then looked at what that meant for the profit margins on the services side (ie the O side) then the profit margins the service provision was making was truly magnificent. 

 

@wibble26 Nov 19 12:03

So you are retreating from the simple lie that PFI payments are just a hugely expensive mortgage to rely on the IPPR report ?  
 

Have I got that right ?

How about you summarise what you think a PFI deal buys and why you think that the prices paid for what was bought are excessive ?  Don’t forget that public sector procurement is also an imperfect human process with inaccuracy, waste and overpayment.  

Dal you seem to be reading stuff that no one wrote so you can argue with it. 

Try reading the actual posts not making stuff up in your head that you think you can argue with. 

 

hth

 

The costs are not “huge” they are lower than any comparable country pays.

The system is not “broken” and if there is a shortage of funding for services it’s because taxnimbys like you refuse to up the spend from 12.5% or GDP to the peer-average 15% now shut up and fook off. 

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