What Does "PFI" Stand For?

See if you can think of an answer once you have read this, by Daniel Martin:

Labour could have doubled the number of hospitals it built if it had not given private firms so much influence over NHS funding, a study has revealed.

Tony Blair’s insistence on using the Private Finance Initiative – essentially an expensive mortgage scheme – meant health trusts paid over the odds for new buildings, the report concluded.

It claimed this led to a ‘one-hospital-for-the-price-of-two’ policy, and put patient care at risk because excessive annual repayments will force some trusts to cut frontline services and jobs.

The news comes as hospitals are having to find savings worth £20billion within four years.

Public health expert Professor Allyson Pollock, who wrote the report, warned: ‘NHS PFI contracts are not good value and are endangering patient care.’

She said hospitals should use the financial crisis as a basis for renegotiating PFI contracts.

Since 1997 most large-scale public capital investment has been through PFI in which banks and building firms raise the funding. The public sector then repays them, often at inflated interest.

In England, 101 of the 135 NHS hospitals built between 1997 and 2009 were paid for under PFI.

But the £42.79billion cost of debt repayments is set to increase because of the financial crisis.

The study, on the British Medical Journal website, found annual PFI debt repayments were up to 2.4 times higher than the amount the Government would pay if it had borrowed the money itself.

Professor Pollock, of the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘Cuts in NHS funding and the high cost of PFI debt charges translate into staff redundancies, service closures and reductions in access to and quality of care for patients.’

The Daily Mail? Yes, the Daily Mail. Middle England is revolting.