YP Letters: NHS left with £300bn debt by politicians who backed PFI

THERE has been a great deal in the national media recently, including The Yorkshire Post, concerning the financial plight of the NHS, and it does not astonish me that the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has a great deal to do with this situation.

For the PFI is like a ‘hidden’ destroyer and ultimate time bomb in many ways for the NHS, as it is off the Government’s balance sheet and does not appear in the national debt. According to a report some five years ago, the British taxpayer will have to pay off over £300bn eventually for current PFI contracts (the projected £774m bill for Calderdale Hospital in my neck of the woods, just a part of it), but if ever inflation picks up that figure could literally go through the roof.

That is if you did not think already that £300bn was not a big enough debt burden for the taxpayer. Indeed the capital investment for this huge PFI amassed debt was only around £54bn, so you can, respectfully, do the maths.

Overall when you study the PFI, it is the main single reason why the NHS is being crippled and let no one tell you otherwise (currently £2bn paid off every year and for decades to come). John Major introduced it in the 1990s, but then Tony Blair and Gordon Brown expanded it out of all recognition.

Both political parties are guilty of the PFI debacle and I am not surprised.

Indeed, between 1997 and 1998, I was, with others, an independent adviser to the old Department of Trade and Industry, advising on White Papers on competitiveness etc and the creation of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Unfortunately, although over 40 of the world’s most creative and inventive minds (eight had Nobel prizes in the sciences and had invented the basis of global industries now turning over $2 trillion annually), the Government and Whitehall took no notice of their advice in advising the government to create a dynamic technologically based manufacturing nation.

No, they put all their eggs in the one basket of service industries (the PFI just being part of that grandiose scheme where ‘they knew best’ and what did a bunch of scientists and engineers know anyway).

Therefore it is no wonder that the NHS is in crisis and it is a catastrophe of the Government’s own making. But unfortunately again, it is not Government ministers and Whitehall mandarins who will pick up the tab, but the poor old taxpayer.