Cost of PFI comes home to roost

Private Finance Initiative (PFI) firms are raking in guaranteed profits at NHS hospitals even as cash-strapped NHS Trusts are cutting jobs and beds as well as asset-stripping sales of land and property in order to bridge the funding gap left by the Government's £20 billion cuts programme. http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/103069

PFI contracts typically last for 30 years and the firms that constructed the facilities receive defined payouts that trusts are unable to cancel or renegotiate. So at a time when the NHS cake is getting smaller the slice to PFI contractors remains untouched.

This validates the critique of PFI pioneered by UNISON since the late 1990's which stated that the generation of additional private sector capital investment in the short term would be outweighed by the long term cost to the public purse.

Clare Williams