Taxpayers are paying five per cent more per year for hospitals built under Labour’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) because the debts are linked to inflation.Currently the combined debt for some 800 PFI projects, including 103 PFI hospitals in England, stands at about £300 billion, according to makers of the programme.

When a BBC Panorama programme contacted 85 hospital trusts with PFI deals, it found 80 of them said they were having to make increased payments due to inflation.

When most of the deals were set up, inflation was low and the outlook was for that to continue well into the future.

Most trusts decided not to protect their debts from rising inflation, against the advice of the Treasury.

By contrast, the companies building the hospitals insured themselves against losses due to inflation.

The PFI deals, under which companies build hospitals to be leased back by the NHS, typically run for 30 years.

Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP who now chairs the Public Accounts Committee, admitted to the programme: “We should have been much more transparent about the costs. I think we got the balance wrong.”

Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the committee, said he thought taxpayers were being “ripped off”.

A spokesman for the Treasury said that protecting PFI debts against inflation was “not mandatory … because it is subject to individual authorities undertaking their own project assessments”.

He added said: “The Government has consistently expressed concerns about the misuse and costliness of PFI. That is why, less than two weeks ago, the Government launched a fundamental review of the PFI model, which will see the end of PFI as we know it.”

Cancer care on the NHS lags behind that in many other developed countries because Labour wasted billions of pounds on PFI schemes, bureaucracy and inflated salaries for managers.A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that, despite record spending on health care, cancer survival rates in Britain are worse than in Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Survival rates for breast cancer, prostate cancer and cervical cancer were below the average for the 34 developed countries in the study.

Mr Lansley lays the blame for the poor performance on the previous government’s failure to make sure that extra investment in the NHS reached the front line. He claims patient care was ignored in favour of increased salaries and botched computer systems.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Lansley says: “Unfortunately this report shows how much work there is to do to deal with Labour’s legacy of neglect and mismanagement of our NHS.

“They hugely increased spending on the Health Service, but wasted much of it on managers, failed IT projects and unsustainable PFI projects.

“They failed to focus on what really matters – patients – which is why we still have some of the worst cancer outcomes amongst comparable countries.”

Under Labour, spending on the NHS trebled, reaching almost £100 billion in 2009, but money for treating cancer still lags behind much of the rest of the world.

A report by the Policy Exchange think tank last year found that England spent around 5.6 per cent of its health care budget on cancer care, compared with 7.7 per cent in France, 9.6 per cent in Germany and 9.2 per cent in America.

In September it emerged that private finance initiatives, introduced by Labour to fund capital projects, have left 60 NHS hospitals on the “brink of financial collapse”. Meanwhile, the pay of NHS chief executives has risen, with typical earnings now more than £150,000.

The OECD figures reveal that the best breast cancer survival rates were in the US, where 89.3 per cent of women were alive five years after being diagnosed. The average across all OECD countries was 83.5 per cent, while in the UK it was 81.3 per cent.

Survival rates for cervical cancer were worse. Norway topped the table with 78.2 per cent still alive after five years, compared with 58 per cent of women in the UK. There were also more hospital admissions for asthma and other lung conditions than the average and infant mortality was higher.

The report also showed that consultations by doctors have fallen, and were below he OECD average in 2009.

Katherine Murphy, the chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “The NHS provides some excellent care but it does fall down on many counts. We know from patients phoning our helpline that the quality of care that they have experienced can be very poor and sometimes it is downright neglectful.

“Rather than trying to tackle the issue of poor care, the Department of Health is demanding that the NHS makes £20 billion of efficiency savings while spending a million pounds a day on a reform plan that doctors, nurses, patients and NHS managers all say risks irrevocably damaging the NHS.”

From:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Cancer-cash-wasted-on-NHS-salaries

Health workers at a Glasgow hospital are staging a protest later over a 113% increase in parking fees.The monthly cost of a permit for the multi-storey at Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI) has risen from £42 to £89.50.

Parking fees at most Scottish hospitals were abolished in 2009 but remained at three sites where car parks were built under Labour’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) .

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said a limited number of £25 permits were available for staff who needed cars.

The multi-storey car park, which opened in 2005, is owned by Impreglio Car Parking and managed by Apcoa under contract to the health board.

Approximately 940 subsidised permits are issued with priority given to staff such as consultants who need to travel between different sites.

Other staff can apply for these permits, but demand outstrips availability and not all applicants are successful.

At the time, Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon urged health boards to limit and reduce the charges until the contracts came to an end.

In September, the issue was raised in the Scottish parliament by Glasgow Kelvin MSP Sandra White.

She was told that the first minister sympathised with the staff, but the Scottish Government was bound by the terms of the PFI agreement signed by the previous Labour administration.

A spokeswoman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “Unfortunately, as the car park is privately-owned, we do not have any control over any tariff increases that Impreglio choose to make.”

The protest was due to take place at the hospital car park from 13:00.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15622723

Patient care is under threat at more than 60 NHS hospitals which are “on the brink of financial collapse” because of costly private finance initiative schemes the Health Secretary warns.Andrew Lansley says he has been contacted by 22 health service trusts which claim their “clinical and financial stability” is being undermined by the costs of the contracts, which the Labour government used extensively to fund public sector projects.

The trusts in jeopardy include Barts and the London, Oxford Radcliffe, North Bristol, St Helens and Knowsley, and Portsmouth.

Between them the trusts run more than 60 hospitals which care for 12 million patients.

There is already evidence that waiting lists for non–urgent operations have begun to rise as hospitals delay treatment to save money. Adding to this are growing fears over the impact of the financial crisis on care this winter.

Under the PFI deals, a private contractor builds a hospital or school. It owns the building for up to 35 years, and during this period the public sector must pay interest and repay the cost of construction, as well as paying the contractor to maintain the building.

However, the total cost of the deals is often far more than the value of the assets. As a result, Mr Lansley says, the 22 trusts “cannot afford” to pay for their schemes, which in total are worth more than £5.4billion, because the required payments have risen sharply in the wake of the recession.

Mr Lansley said: “Over the last year, we’ve been working to expose the mess Labour left us with, and the truth is that some hospitals have been landed with PFI deals they simply cannot afford.

“Like the economy, Labour has brought some parts of the NHS to the brink of financial collapse. Tough solutions may be needed for these problems, but we’ll help the NHS overcome them. We will not make the sick pay for Labour’s debt crisis.”

He said hospitals would not be allowed to collapse financially.

“There are many hospitals that are well run, do not have a legacy of debt and do have projects which are perfectly sustainable. My point is that we have looked since the election and are working together with individual trusts to arrive at a place where they are financially, and in terms of the quality of their services, sustainable for the future. We can only do that if we work closely with them,” he said.

“This is about making very clear that we are not only working on unsustainable PFIs, but also working with legacy debt that the NHS has been left with, working on the IT programmes which were on an unsustainable scale of contractual commitments that didn’t meet the need of the NHS’s customers.

“Across the board, we have to tackle Labour’s legacy of poor value formoney and debt.”

Over the next few weeks, Department of Health officials and executives at the 22 trusts will develop detailed plans for dealing with the crisis. Their proposals are expected to include significant cost–cutting and the renegotiation of PFI contracts.

Money will also be moved from NHS trusts that are in better financial shape to cover the debt costs at those that are struggling. However, officials are braced for the need to use Whitehall funds to bail out some hospitals.

Among the trusts which have contacted Mr Lansley to inform him of their severe financial problems are several London institutions, including South London Healthcare, Barking, Havering and Redbridge, and North Middlesex.

Outside the capital, other trusts to have approached the health department include Wye Valley, Worcester Acute Hospitals, Mid Yorkshire, and Walsall.

After the general election last year, Mr Lansley ordered officials to establish why some NHS hospitals were under–performing. The health department is assessing the financial position of every hospital. It is understood that the PFI costs have emerged as a leading factor in poor patient care in some areas.

The Health Secretary decided to disclose the list of hospitals in difficulty and is expected to announce the rescue plans for each trust next month.

Taxpayers are having to pay more than £200 billion for schools, hospitals and other projects whose capital value is little more than £50 billion.

In one example, a hospital in Bromley, south east London, will ultimately cost the NHS £1.2 billion, more than 10 times what it is worth. Another hospital was charged £52,000 for maintenance that cost £750. The annual cost of the schemes is almost £400 for each household.

The public payments for PFI deals are typically linked to inflation and therefore the cost to taxpayers has increased by up to a third since the beginning of the credit crisis, according to the National Audit Office. Last month, MPs on the Treasury select committee effectively called for a moratorium on new PFI projects, which it said were “like a drug” as the costs were not apparent at the outset.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, has tightened the rules on the deals.

Earlier this year, John Healey, the shadow health secretary, admitted in an interview that Labour ministers had failed when negotiating the multi–million pound schemes for hospitals.

“There is definitely a case for saying we were poor at PFI, poor at negotiating PFI contracts at the outset,” he said.

Companies who run PFI schemes boast profit margins of up to 71 per cent on the projects, but have come under growing pressure from MPs and ministers to return some of their “windfall profits”.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-hospitals-crippled-by-PFI-scheme

Under Labour’s Private Finance Initiative schemes, British taxpayers are committed to pay £229 billion for new hospitals, schools and other projects with a capital value of just £56 billion.
Several contracts are due to run for 60 years, documents released under freedom of information requests show, meaning taxpayers will be paying for the projects for generations to come.

Private contractors who agreed PFI deals with the Labour Government are set to make billions of pounds in profit, with some due to see returns of up to 71 per cent.

In the first of a series of reports, The Daily Telegraph discloses the heavy costs and administrative burdens caused by PFIs. The deals are a way of building large public projects using private finance, which were relied upon by the Labour government. The disclosures will lend weight to MPs calling on PFI companies to refund a share of their profits to the taxpayer.

The PFI deals include:

• A hospital which charged £52,000 for a job that cost £750. Demolishing a shelter for smokers resulted in the PFI contractor charging £2,600 a year for the “extra cleaning”.

• A hospital in Bromley, south London, which will cost the NHS £1.2 billion, more than 10 times what it is worth.

• Military dog kennels which would have ended up costing more per night than a room in the Park Lane Hilton, London. The deal to replace facilities at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray resulted in the sacking of the contractor and the scrapping of the contract.

Under a PFI, a private contractor builds a school, hospital or other asset, then owns it for typically between 25 and 35 years, effectively renting it to the taxpayer for that time. In exchange, the contractor has responsibility for maintenance.

Treasury papers suggest that payments on PFI contracts already signed run until 2048. The Daily Telegraph has uncovered deals, signed in the late 1990s, which include special clauses meaning that they last for up to six decades.

So a 21 year-old leaving university this year will pay taxes for the PFI until they are almost 70. By then, some of the facilities will have been obsolete for years. Political pressure on the PFIs, introduced by John Major but greatly expanded when Gordon Brown was chancellor, was mounting last night after The Telegraph established the scale of profit-making by some of those involved.

An almost unknown City company, Innisfree, with only 14 staff, is the largest single player in the PFI market, owning or co-owning 269 PFI schools and 28 hospitals.

According to accounts filed at Companies House, Innisfree’s profit margin was 53 per cent last year. A successful FTSE 100 company makes margins of around 6 per cent. David Metter, the founder and chief executive of Innisfree, owns almost three-quarters of the company and collected pay and dividends of £8.6 million last year.

“Innisfree have made money like it is going out of style,” said Jesse Norman, the Conservative MP for Hereford. “A tiny number of individuals have made more money for less work than any other group of people I can think of.” Innisfree said its directors were at a conference in Chamonix yesterday and unable to comment.

Mr Norman heads a new cross-party group of MPs demanding that Innisfree and other PFI beneficiaries return a portion of their profits to the taxpayer. “It’s a scandal that so many projects have been so expensive to the taxpayer,” he said yesterday. “There is a great deal of excess value in the PFI which should properly be shared with taxpayers.”

Labour’s last health secretary, Andy Burnham, who was in charge of 221 PFI projects, admitted last year: “We made mistakes. I’m not defending every pen-stroke of the PFI contracts we signed.”

Innisfree co-owns the Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley, opened in 2003, which cost an estimated £118 million to build and equip according to Treasury figures. However, Treasury calculations seen by The Daily Telegraph indicate the NHS will have paid Innisfree and its PFI partners a total of £1.21 billion for the hospital over the 35-year life of the contract, but this does include support services.

The National Audit Office says the deal will produce a return for the PFI contractors of 70.6 per cent.

Jean Shaoul, a professor of public accountability at Manchester University Business School, said using the private sector as an intermediary to raise finance to build hospitals and to run them is “far more expensive than if the Government were to do it itself”. Carl Emmerson, the acting director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “Where you can be very confident about the service you want for the whole period of the contract, as with a road, it can work. In schools and hospitals, where needs change, it’s much harder to get value for money.”

In Belfast, a school closed after seven years but the PFI contractor must be paid £370,000 a year for the next 16 years.

From:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Private-Finance-Initiative-hospitals-will-bring-taxpayers-60-years-of-pain

A hospital trust will save £14million after becoming the first in the country to buy its way out of a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal.
The NHS body was due to pay £2m a year for the next two decades to the private firm that built West Park Hospital in Darlington, County Durham.

But after reviewing the costs, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys Mental Health Foundation Trust decided to take advantage of a break clause in the deal.

It paid £18m upfront to get out of the PFI contract 23 years early, but it now owns the hospital outright and expects to save £14m over the course of the deal once maintenance and inflation is taken into account.

The move, disclosed in the Health Service Journal, comes after The Daily Telegraph uncovered evidence that hospitals are closing accident and emergency departments in order to pay the interest on PFI deals for new buildings.

Some PFI hospitals – built and run by private firms and effectively rented back to the state – will end up costing taxpayers more than 10 times their capital value.

“We concluded that the best option was to exercise what exists in the PFI projects, which is a clause called ‘voluntary termination’,” said Colin Martin, Director of Finance at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys trust.

“It effectively means we pay off the mortgage early.”

However he added that the trust – which runs mental health services in County Durham, the Tees Valley and along the North Yorkshire coast – did not regret the original deal and was committed to two other PFI deals.

“We wouldn’t have had the hospital if we’d waited for the traditional financing route,” Mr Martin said.

PFI deals became the preferred way of paying for public sector infrastructure projects under Labour, as they allowed new buildings to be constructed while avoiding large initial outlays of money.

Under the complex deals, private contractors carry out the building work then own the structure for up to 35 years, while the public sector body gives them annual interest and repays the capital sum as well as paying for maintenance.

However because of the length of the deals and the amount of interest involved, taxpayers end up paying several times the original value of the project.

In the first known example of an NHS hospital buying its way out of a PFI deal, the North-East mental health trust decided to purchase West Park Hospital outright.

It had agreed a 32-year deal with Norwich Union Public Private Partnership Fund to build the 116-bed facility, which opened its doors in 2004.

The hospital – which is also home to the trust’s headquarters – cost £16m to build but under the deal, the trust was paying the contractors £1.4m a year in interest payments and a further £600,000 in maintenance and paying back the principal.

In 2009, the trust reviewed its PFI deals and decided it had enough cash in the bank to pay the £18m break clause and so buy West Park outright. It gave the project company the required statutory notice and after the legal process was completed, the deal ended in December.

Treasury figures suggest it would have the remainder of the deal would have cost a further £32m, so it has saved £14m by getting out of it.

However it is unlikely the pioneering move will be copied by many other trusts, as most PFI deals are so large as to make early repayment impractical.

Aviva, the company that now runs the PFI firm that built West Park, was unavailable for comment.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Hospital-saves-14m-by-getting-out-of-PFI-deal

Companies that have made billions from “outrageous” Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts face being told to return cash to the taxpayer, a senior Coalition minister has said.Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, claimed that many PFI deals were “ghastly” and imposed an unfair “penalty” on schools, hospitals and other public services.

It is understood that Cabinet Office and Treasury officials are examining PFI contracts worth billions of pounds, looking for ways to claw back money for taxpayers. Signalling an end to the era of PFI, Mr Maude said the Coalition’s plans for a “new world” of radically reformed public services will make the controversial contracts look “outdated” and unnecessary.

A campaign led by Jesse Norman, a Conservative backbencher, is calling for PFI firms to pay a £500 million “rebate” to the Exchequer. PFI was introduced by the last Conservative government and expanded under Labour. Private contractors meet the upfront costs of building hospitals and other facilities and then operate them, recouping the money from the taxpayer over many years.

The Daily Telegraph has this week disclosed the long-term burden for taxpayers, who will pay contractors many times the original construction costs.

Treasury figures show that taxpayers will spend £229 billion on projects that cost contractors only £56 billion. The biggest single PFI contractor is Innisfree, which employs 14 people but owns or co-owns 28 NHS hospitals and 269 schools. Its chief executive has built a personal fortune of more than £50 million since founding the company in 1995.

The profits made by some PFI firms are unacceptable, Mr Maude said. “Some of the deals done were ghastly. Some of the deals we’ve come across, the people on the other side must have been laughing all the way to the bank,” he said. “We are looking to see whether there are things we can do.”

Establishing where the final ownership of PFI contracts lies is “very complicated” because many contracts have been sold on and refinanced by other investors, Mr Maude warned. But he insisted that ministers were determined to challenge contracts that are harming public services. ”None of this is easy, but we’re looking to see what can be done, because there is a penalty being paid by schools and hospitals. Some have a millstone of a PFI around their neck.”

Mr Maude, who is in charge of the Coalition’s plans to make Whitehall spend more efficiently, is part of a group of ministers working on a White Paper on public service reforms meant to break the state’s monopoly on providing services and invite public sector workers, charities and companies to run them.

These reforms will see the state move on from PFI to new funding models, he said. Next week, he will publish plans to allow state workers to create mutually-owned companies that will own and operate services including clinics, nurseries and rehabilitation centres.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Force-firms-to-repay-ghastly-PFI-profits-says-minister

Labour’s Private Finance Initiative- NHS hospitals will cost taxpayers 60 years of pain.
Under Private Finance Initiative schemes, British taxpayers are committed to pay £229 billion for new hospitals, schools and other projects with a capital value of just £56 billion.

Official figures show that, under Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes, British taxpayers are committed to pay £229 billion for new hospitals, schools and other projects with a capital value of just £56 billion.

Several contracts are due to run for 60 years, documents released under freedom of information requests show, meaning taxpayers will be paying for the projects for generations to come.

Private contractors who agreed PFI deals with the Government are set to make billions of pounds in profit, with some due to see returns of up to 71 per cent.

In a series of reports, UK media lines disclose the heavy costs and administrative burdens caused by PFIs. The deals are a way of building large public projects using private finance, which were relied upon by the Labour government. The disclosures will lend weight to MPs calling on PFI companies to refund a share of their profits to the taxpayer.

The PFI deals include:
• A hospital which charged £52,000 for a job that cost £750. Demolishing a shelter for smokers resulted in the PFI contractor charging £2,600 a year for the additional work .
• A hospital in Bromley, south London, which will cost the NHS £1.2billion, more than 10 times what it is worth.
• An empty school which will cost taxpayers £370,000 a year until 2027. Another school had to pay £302 for a socket, five times the cost of the equipment it wanted to plug in.
• Military dog kennels which would have ended up costing more per night than a room in the Park Lane Hilton, London. The deal to replace facilities at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray resulted in the sacking of the contractor and the scrapping of the contract.
Under a PFI, a private contractor builds a school, hospital or other asset, then owns it for typically between 25 and 35 years, effectively renting it to the taxpayer for that time. In exchange, the contractor has responsibility for maintenance.

Treasury papers suggest that payments on PFI contracts already signed run until 2048. The Daily Telegraph (a UK daily broadsheet) has uncovered deals, signed in the late 1990s, which include special clauses meaning that they last for up to six decades.

So a 21 year-old leaving university this year will pay taxes for the PFI until they are almost 70.

By then, some of the facilities will have been obsolete for years. Political pressure on the PFIs, introduced by John Major but greatly expanded when Gordon Brown was chancellor, was mounting last night after The Telegraph established the scale of profit-making by some of those involved.

An almost unknown City company, Innisfree, with only 14 staff, is the largest single player in the PFI market, owning or co-owning 269 PFI schools and 28 hospitals.

According to accounts filed at Companies House, Innisfree’s profit margin was 53 per cent last year. A successful FTSE 100 company makes margins of around 6 per cent. David Metter, the founder and chief executive of Innisfree, owns almost three-quarters of the company and collected pay and dividends of £8.6 million last year.

Jesse Norman, the Conservative MP for Hereford has been quoted as saying that Innisfree have made money like it is going out of style, and that a tiny number of individuals have made more money for less work than any other group of people he can think of. Innisfree said its directors were at a conference abroad yesterday and unable to comment, although there is no suggestion that Innisfree has done anything improper or illegal.

Mr Norman heads a new cross-party group of MPs demanding that Innisfree and other PFI beneficiaries return a portion of their profits to the taxpayer, saying that it’s scandal.

Labour’s last health secretary, Andy Burnham, who was in charge of 221 PFI projects, admitted last year that mistakes were made. Innisfree co-owns the Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley, opened in 2003, which cost an estimated £118million to build and equip according to Treasury figures.

However, Treasury calculations indicate the NHS will have paid Innisfree and its PFI partners a total of £1,210 million for the hospital over the 35-year life of the contract, but this does include support services. The National Audit Office says the deal will produce a return for the PFI contractors of around 70 per cent.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Private-Finance-Initiative-hospitals-will-bring-taxpayers-60-years-of-pain

NHS trusts are closing accident and emergency departments to help pay for hospitals built under Labour’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) an investigation by The Daily Telegraph has found.
Since 2007, more than a fifth of England’s hospital trusts with active PFI hospitals have closed casualty departments, or published proposals to do so. In the same period, only four per cent of trusts without PFI hospitals have closed, or proposed to close, A&E units.

Fewer than a quarter of England’s 168 NHS hospital trusts have significant PFI hospitals in operation. But these trusts account for almost two-thirds of A&E closures or proposed closures.

Health campaigners said there was a “clear connection” between the “inflated” costs of the PFI and the cuts in A&E.

Most trusts insisted there was no connection — not all A&E closures are necessarily done on financial grounds and some are supported by local clinicians.

In recent days, The Daily Telegraph has disclosed how some PFI hospitals – built and operated by the private sector, and effectively rented back to the taxpayer – will end up costing the public purse more than 10 times their capital value.

The new Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley, south London, cost £118million to build. It will end up costing taxpayers £1.2billion, including facilities management. South London Healthcare, the NHS trust responsible for the Princess Royal, has a second PFI hospital, the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich.

The trust’s annual deficit was raised to £100million by the two deals. It has closed the A&E unit at one of its non-PFI hospitals, Queen Mary’s in Sidcup.

In internal documents seen by The Daily Telegraph, the trust stated that the “occupation costs” of the PFI hospitals were roughly double those of its non-PFI hospital.

A spokesman admitted that its PFI contracts placed “some undeniable restrictions on our flexibility”. But she insisted that the decision to close A&E at Sidcup was “entirely unrelated” to PFI.

Other trusts closing A&E units include Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, which recently opened a new PFI hospital and plans to shut the full A&E unit at its non-PFI hospital in Rugby.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge Trust, which opened a new PFI hospital in Romford, wants to close the A&E unit King George’s Hospital in Ilford.

East Lancashire Trust has closed A&E at its Burnley hospital to help pay for a new PFI hospital at Blackburn. In Nottinghamshire, Sherwood Forest NHS Trust has downgraded A&E services at Newark after opening a new PFI hospital in Mansfield. At least four other trusts with PFI hospitals have similar plans.

Under its PFI contract, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich, must have 64 visits a year from pest controllers, even when there are no pests to control. When there are pests, the hospital must pay for further visits, which it did 10 times last year.

Food served at the Queen Alexandra PFI hospital in Portsmouth is cooked in south Wales, then driven 100 miles to Hampshire.

Early PFI hospitals had on average 20 per cent fewer beds than the hospitals they replaced, according to research. Because of high service charges, several PFI hospitals cannot afford to keep even these reduced numbers of beds fully open.

In an effort to disguise their private ownership, a number of PFI hospitals have changed their names to include a royal connection. Greenwich District Hospital became Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Salford Hope Hospital is now Salford Royal. Oldchurch Hospital, Romford, became Queen’s Hospital. Farnborough Hospital, in Bromley, was renamed after Princess Anne.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Casualty-units-shut-to-pay-for-private-finance-hospital-contracts

Bringing more competition to the NHS under White Paper reforms would be “potentially damaging” the British Medical Association (BMA) argues.A market-led approach “creates waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency”, Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of council at the BMA, said.

Under proposals put forward in July by Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, GPs are to be given the power to manage £80 billion of the NHS budget to buy care from hospitals and other doctors, while tiers of management are to be axed.

The BMA said today- Friday, that while it was “interested” in these proposals, the greater efficiencies they could bring might be undermined by more private sector involvement.

Dr Meldrum said: “There are proposals in the White Paper that doctors can support and want to work with. But there is also much that would be potentially damaging.

“The BMA has consistently argued that clinicians should have more autonomy to shape services for patients, but pitting them against each other in a market-based system creates waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency.”

Dr Meldrum said that while he was “not ideologically against markets” he did not believe the evidence showed they had worked in the NHS so far.

Private finance initiatives and privately-run treatment centres, which sold their services to the NHS, resulted in taxpayers’ money leaving the service, he said.

“The private sector is not doing this out of some great social generosity, they want to make a profit,” he argued.

He was talking as the BMA submitted its response to the White Paper: Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/BMA-says-White-Paper-reforms-potentially-damaging