We have always known that PFI was a con trick (i) to take construction and management costs of hospitals and other public buildings offline so they don’t appear in the national accounts, and (ii) to secure the extremely lucrative privatisation of yet another public service at taxpayers’ expense. But the evidence of how the new outsourced authorities manipulated this fiddle has not hitherto been made so blatantly transparent as in the latest case to come to light.
Six months ago the Treasury approved a PFI for the £360m Midland Metropolitan hospital in Birmingham. As a result the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals Trust will be forced to pay out £18m for 30 years, i.e. £540m in total – an extremely bad deal for taxpayers. So how was it ever justified in the first place? Answer: the NHS Trust Development Authority, that is the hospital’s regulator, opined that “income growth assumptions are significant”. With the NHS in its near-bankrupt state plus the intention to move care out of hospitals over time, this is not just a heroic assumption, it’s fantasy. Continue reading
Let’s get one thing straight from the off. The idea of 
Today is the anniversary of the first of 22 days of strike action by GMB members at the Great Western Hospital (GWH) in Swindon, one of the earliest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) build and operate hospitals, and only the second opened by Carillion. This long running industrial dispute between the union and Carillion, over the failure of the company to recognise GMB, the unfair holiday system, and the culture of management bullying, which included years of covering up a system of shakedowns and extortion by supervisors, who terrorised the mainly South Asian women workforce into giving gold, money and other valuables in exchange for shift changes, overtime or holiday approvals. This extortion had been reported to Carillion in at least 2007, and the company was aware of the accusations at director level in at least 2009. 
