Question 1. How do you spell ‘Labour got it wrong’?
Answer: ‘The Tories did it’
What is the missing word in this report on the failure of PFI hospitals?
And the answer isn’t ‘Tory’.
Hospitals are either going to close or be put into ‘administration’ because their costs have spiralled out of control as they try to make the PFI payments.
What else is there?
Oh yes this: ‘The capital simply has too many hospitals.’
The BBC report down plays the PFI payments as causes of the huge losses and blames firstly the wrong type of patients, secondly not enough of the wrong type of patients anyway, and only lastly having to find huge sums of money to pay off Labour’s (yes that’s the word) PFI scheme….South London Healthcare cut costs by £47 million but still overspent by £40 million…by my maths that is a loss of £87 million in one year without the savings. Money well spent by Labour trying to ‘buy’ an election or two.
So the truth about Labour’s NHS spending splurge that built vast numbers of hospitals is that there are too many hospitals, built in the wrong places, and designed for the wrong mix of patients.
Isn’t it ironic that it is Labour spending that has broken the NHS and not ‘Tory Cuts’?
Would the report have mentioned the Tories if they had implemented vastly improvident financial planning for the NHS and it had all gone very, very wrong?
I would like to think not…but somehow know better.
Update:
Yes it is the Tories fault……’could it be that the Tories ‘pointless’ reorganisation of the NHS has distracted them from the proper running of the NHS and delayed them taking action to prevent the meltdown?’ ….asks BBC news reader.
There is a very scary story in that graph and if you think about it this would apply to local authority (local council taxes) and police authority spending.
Brown really thought the bubble would never burst and they thought there was a never ending supply of taxed wealth.
I would be the first to condemn Labour fecklessness and the horror that is PFI – and say that having been at close quarters to its inner workings. But let it not be forgotten that health spending was always going to increase spectacularly in 1997, since the NHS was in dramatically bad shape and all parties were pledging to sort it out, aided by bumper tax revenues thanks to the sound economic policies of the outgoing administration.
All parties may have pledged to sort out the NHS but as you can see from the graph, which also nails the lie about NHS spending under the Tories falling…it was rising at a modest pace under Tory plans…nothing ‘spectacular’…and not the reckless uncontrolled spending that Brown initiated with no means to pay for it.
Let’s look at what Brown committed the NHS to…and that doesn’t include the £12 billion or more wasted on a computer system that doesn’t work.
103 PFI deals…costing initially £11.4 bn…final cost £65 billion.
South London Healthcare are losing £1 million a week…their PFI deal cost them an initial £210 million…they have paid £530 million and still have £2 billion more to pay.
I don’t think you can suggest that a Tory government would have been as profligate and spendthrift…..this spending was in no way funded by tax revenues…it is to be paid for by your children and their children in the long years to come.
‘Let’s look at what Brown committed the NHS to…and that doesn’t include the £12 billion or more wasted on a computer system that doesn’t work.’ Funny how this one never gets a mention on the BBC either. Yet the shock horror expressed on the BBC news last night at the revelation that it might cost RBS £200 million to sort its computer systems mess out. Hypocritical, biased bastards.
Do you mean a sort of ‘end to boom and bust’? Funny how we never hear that one repeated by the BBC either (but how different had it been the mantra of one of Thatcher’s chancellors).
You can always tell when the left has been caught slumped over the wheel of a wrecked car, reeking of whisky, because the BBC report goes heavy on the passive voice. A huge deficit has arisen. Massive costs have been incurred. A shot has been fired.
Not that there’s not something to be said for that kind if straight up reporting, but for an organisation that can’t make a cute show about meercats without tagging on a message about climate change, it’s all a bit late to suddenly decide that ‘root causes’ are not to be mentioned.
Around 1pm on Radio 4 they had some people talking about this – they explicitly mentioned John Major and PFI (I was driving so I’m not sure if they said if his government implemented it) but there was no mention of Labour in relation to PFI at all – how can this be?
I would hope that some researcher in the BBC would be able to dispel all doubt as to the source of the current and, I have no doubt, even more serious, future debts under PFI initiatives. (Not that I would expect the BBC to ever publish that information, of course – but it should, if it was worth its salt as a provider of an unbiased and balanced view of the real issues facing the taxpayers/electorate.)
It should not be beyond the wit of the BBC to investigate the following.
“What was the extent, and the current status, of PFI initiatives actually committed to by the previous Conservative government from the time of their inception under John Major, until Labour got into power in 1997. And what was the extent, and the current status, of PFI initiatives committed to under the Labour government of 1997-2010.”
I’m pretty sure I could make a shrewd guess as to the source of the ills which PFI debt – hidden from the public by the ‘off-balance-sheet’ shenanigans of Mr Gordon Brown – is going to rain down on us over the next 20 years or so until they begin to unwind. Of course, when these initiatives do unwind, none of the assets actually belong to the country , so the taxpayer will get bitten again, as we try to replace the assets – or get sucked into even more long-term debt.
But ‘hey-ho’, the BBC tries to obfuscate by simply, and incessantly, chanting the following introductory mantra whenever the subject is raised….. “PFI projects, conceived under the previous Conservative government, when led by John Major………” It doesn’t matter to the BBC what the real problem is, and how it was caused – they have the get-out they would always wish to have.
That is sad but true. The collective amnesia over the last 13 years as to the causes of our financial problems.
PFI, d’origine française, was meant to be for BIG projects like the Channel Tunnel, Brown used it boost short-term investment, whilst being dishonest about the true cost (out of sight, out of mind) – but worse is the lamentable service deals attached to these projects. Still, good for photo opps and electioneering.
PFI is a disaster unfolding before our eyes.
I can only assume you never saw the Panorama report on PFIs…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9647000/9647431.stm
If its still available on I-Player, a double dose of blood pressure medication is strongly advised prior to viewing.
…and yet it is still the nasty Tories who supposedly want to privatise the NHS, or destroy it completely. No party introduced more privatisation into the NHS than New Labour, far more than Fatcha would have even dared, and the form of private involvement that Labour chose is now causing their beloved NHS far more illness than those uncaring Tories ever inflicted.
Have a look at this BBC article from last September about the Scottish situation. The final word is given to a Labour spokesman, who admits that their PFI schemes were ill-advised, but passes the blame to the previous Tory government…
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Labour, who were responsible for many of the PFI projects in Scotland when they were in coalition with the Lib Dems in the Scottish Executive, now suggest they had no choice but to accept these contracts to keep public borrowing down.
Lewis MacDonald, the party’s Holyrood spokesperson on infrastructure, said: “One of the things we said in the run-up to the 1997 UK general election was that we would keep in place for the first two years the spending plans we inherited from the Tory government.
“Not because we thought they were good spending plans but because we knew that it was critical that the money markets had confidence that an incoming Labour government would maintain economic stability.”
—————————————————
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-14995385
More here…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9356622/Labours-PFI-landmines-continue-to-explode-in-the-NHS.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2077784/Labours-botched-PFI-deals-sent-NHS-costs-soaring.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2040348/60-hospitals-face-crisis-Labours-PFI-deals.html
“Not because we thought they were good spending plans but because we knew that it was critical that the money markets had confidence that an incoming Labour government would maintain economic stability.”
In other words, Labour thought spending plans that maintained economic stability were a load of crap. No, hang on, they didn’t just think it, they said it.
Uneblievable, even by their standards.
Does the graph actually include the ‘off-balance sheet’ PFI capital expenditure? Or is it simply an indication of the explosion in costs of the NHS, that went in salaries, layers of management, mission creep initiatives of various self-righteous NHS off-shoot bodies, big Pharma…
The motto being: ‘don’t worry, the taxpayer is paying for it.’
Was the NHS really that bad before 1997? Not sure that it was.
You’ve got wonder just how bad Brown’s NHS Brainwave would have looked on the balance sheet if it was not for the revenue from the wrong type of visitor in the wrong type of car visiting the wrong type of patient, yet paying for the privilege through exorbitant parking fees.
Jesus Christ, York City’s Hospital reception area would not look out of place in Las Vegas, what with all those machines offering you gold nuggets (at a price) should you not wish to play Russain Roulette over a parking fine for your vehicle.
The school building programme is also PFI. I have seen some of these schools. Incredible buildings with no expense spared. All built under Labour of course. Then there are the railways. Astronomical costs to the taxpayer which are also hidden somehow. HS2 has gone very quiet. I suspect there is no money left to build it.
The Bromley part of South London Healthcare was insolvent long before PFI, as I am sure were other bits. Bromley routinely used land sales to cover up its underlying deficit. With the PFI, that ended because every square foot of land was sold to housing developers to help fund the PFI.
The Trust has had its arm twisted to agree so called “block contracts” to protect the commissioners from paying for the care provided for residents. One year a former chief Executive bizzarely agreed a 25% discount on its treatment cost to the local PCT, leaving his own Trust with the deficit.
The root cause of this and many other “overspends” is the crooked capitation funding formula created by Labour which sends up to 50% more money per head to Labour authorities than some southern Tory authorities, under the guise of “poverty” weightings and other bullshit. This government appears completely unaware how they have been shafted by Labour.
There is an ideological argument to be had about PFI, true, but it is not the cause of South London Healthcare’s underlying financial deficit. Always follow the money, and as usual it always leads to the red flag.
When will BBC-NUJ make this link?:-
“Indian call centres selling YOUR credit card details and medical records for just 2p.
“Data belonging to 500,000 Britons on offer to criminals and marketing firms.
“Crooks offering information on customers of major High Street banks.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116649/Indian-centres-selling-YOUR-credit-card-details-medical-records-just-2p.html#ixzz1yyupIcwZ
As BBC-NUJ should observer, the interests of British people, taxpayers and workers, are not served by mass redundancies by banks and other companies in Britain, and the transfer of jobs to incompetent Indian workers.