, companies that have built NHS hospitals have made pre-tax profits of £831 million over the past six years){kind=link}
Under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), companies that have built NHS hospitals have made pre-tax profits of £831 million over the past six years and set to make £1 billion more over the next five.
According to The Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) publication, the NHS is spending huge sums of money on private companies at a time when the health service is low on funding.
“This money was designated by parliament to pay for patient care, not to pay dividends to a small number of investors. Given the extreme austerity in the NHS where patients are being denied treatment and waiting times for operations are rising, the government needs to take action to stop this leakage of taxpayer funds out of the NHS.” said the CHPI co-chair, Colin Leys.
The NHS has released an analysis of its spending on Wednesday and declared that if they had not been paying profits on these PFI schemes between the years of 2010 and 2015, deficits in hospitals would be a quarter less than they stand today.
The PFI contracts are particularly controversial because they are much more expensive than public borrowing. Recently published figures show that repayments will continue increasing until they peak at £10.1 billion a year by 2017-18.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “The NHS is recognised by the independent Commonwealth Fund as the most efficient healthcare system in the world and currently spends less than 3% of its annual budget on PFI,” said A Department of Health spokesperson.
“The first PFI contracts for NHS hospitals, which were signed in 1997, range between 25-30 years – this report analyses just six years of contracts and as a result does not represent the full picture.”
The CHPI is now calling for caps on the amount of profit that can be made from PFI contracts, taxing PFI companies to recoup costs and renegotiating PFI contracts or using government loans to “buy out” companies.