Wes Streeting caught saying he’s ‘very sympathetic’ to using more NHS PFI

On BBC Radio 4 on 17 February, Nick Robinson asked Labour Party health secretary Wes Streeting about re-introducing private finance initiatives (PFI)s to fund NHS capital budgets:

Again, Amanda Pritchard, the head of NHS England told us last week ‘we want to use private finance to build hospitals, we know… in the NHS that we simply aren’t going to get the money directly from the taxpayer’, are you prepared as health secretary to go back to… PFI… in which private firms build hospitals and then lease them back to the NHS?

NHS PFI: the extent of the con job

The whole framing of this NHS PFI question is ridiculous, given private capital charges the taxpayer astronomically more in the long run to pay off PFI deals. The debt from PFI across sectors stands at over £300bn for projects with an actual value of £54.7bn. The entire NHS budget is £192bn.

In response, Streeting said he’s “very sympathetic to the argument that we should try and leverage in private finance.” Although, he did admit that PFI shouldered “the NHS with an enormous cost that it continues to bear…. I think there is a role for private investment, but the terms of those arrangements, that’s where you’ve got to tread really carefully”.

As IPPR notes, NHS hospitals are “under strain” from an £80bn PFI bill for investments that are actually worth only £13bn.

When the NHS previously built new hospitals like the expansion to district general hospitals in the 1960s, the government funded the buildings. The Tory and New Labour scam artists weren’t ransacking the public purse in that way and the post WWII consensus that there was more of a role for the collective in society was intact.

Then, Margaret Thatcher came along in 1979 and hijacked the new prominence of individualism in the 1970s in order to sell off utilities that should de facto be in the commons, like electricity, gas, and water. Before then, nationalised public services made the government net income of around £40bn per year (in today’s prices). So, in just a year and a half, the government could have funded the entire infrastructure projects that NHS PFI has brought in since 1992 (without the PFI interest debt, without raising any taxes).

Labour government is ‘rewriting history’

Johnbosco Nwogbo of We Own It said of NHS PFI deals:

Support for more private finance in our NHS should disqualify you from being health secretary. Many NHS trusts are still spending more on PFI debts than on medicines for patients. Several paid out more to PFI last year than their annual deficit as a trust, diverting funds that could’ve been spent fixing the crisis in A&E…There appears to be a concerted effort by the government and the NHS top brass to rewrite history on how disastrous PFI has been.

It’s certainly concerning that head of NHS England Pritchard and Streeting are touting PFIs on the BBC.

Even the Tories in 2018 declared “goodbye PFI”, because government reports laid out how shockingly bad the deal was. On a variety of issues, Keir Starmer’s government is as bad if not worse than the Tories. Will PFI be another?

Featured image via the Canary