Private Eye Number Crunching

[Hymie]

£10,000,000,000 - Amount the NHS will spend on Private Finance Initiative contracts over the next five years.

0 – Number of times Private Finance Initiatives are mentioned in the NHS five-year plan.

[Peter Pedant]

ten billion - that is about it

at the time we all said they were overpriced and the politicians - Gordon Brown mainly just said: " we're doing it anyway"

If the NHS five year plan is income and income related
then PFIs wont be mentioned as they are capital related

( that is why they came about - private companies benefit and how ! and the govt is allowed to transfer income related activity to the capital account and thereby lose it )

I thought everyone knew that

[Gromit]

You are right PP and PFI flourished under Brown, but credit where it is due...

It was actually the Conservatives under John Major who introduced PFI and set the template.

[buildersmate]

And your point is?
Perhaps that a huge investment in capital through new buildings and equipment has been made by the nation, in a relatively short space of time, that has upgraded much of the health service.
Like a mortgage this is being paid for over many years (the typical length of a PFI contract is 25 years).
Like many favour of the month initiatives, this one has run its course so doesn't feature in current planning.

[beegeebee]

Quite true but, the most damaging thing about all the P.F.I.'s is the companies are managing to send their profits abroad, (somewhat akin to Starbucks, Google etc.,) and therefore denying tax due on the profits from H.M.F.C..

[ToraToraTora]

so they spend in the private sector! This may come as a shock but the public sector produces nothing, 0, nitto, in fact it's is negative force. So if they buy something say a spud for dinner, they have to spend it with someone that produces something. QED!

[Peter Pedant]

// And your point is? //
govts have wasted truly huge quantities of money which couldhave been spent with better value for money if they had listened to the objections in the first place.

[buildersmate]

Which companies for example?
Most of the construction companies are British - people such as AMEC, Balfour-Beatty and the like (by way of just two examples). They get paid for the construction element of the capital asset by the borrowings from the financial institutions. They've been paid long ago for their contracts.
The financial institutions raised the capital from international markets - so you could be right about that. But that's a factor in any funding raising capital project.
The operators (who are a relatively small element of the annual cost to the NHS Trusts, because much of it is interest on the debt) are not especially foreign. OK so Sodexho springs to mind - who are French.
Who are you talking about, Beeg?

[buildersmate]

TTT.
You appear to have been swayed by the left-wing mantra that hates PFI because it forced changes in the way services were delivered and in many cases outsourced some provision of labour into the private sector via TUPE transfer.
No PFI equals no new hospitals.
Fundamental flaw was that NHS Trust managers forgot that this was a long term commitment (because of paying for the asset over 25 years like a mortgage), and that their income comes from central Government.
They overcommitted