David Cameron accused of putting NHS on 'fast track' to privatisation after biggest-ever outsourcing deal

Critic: Labour's shadow health secretary Andy Burnham

David Cameron has been accused of putting the NHS on a “fast track to privatisation”.

Opposition MPs and doctors hit out after it emerged that the health service has launched its biggest-ever outsourcing deal.

Bids have been invited for £1.2billion worth of contracts to run cancer and end-of-life services.

The move could see private companies delivering all cancer and terminally-ill care across Staffordshire as soon as July 2015.

Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: “It is clear that ministers are determined to force ever-larger and more valuable contracts out to the open market.

"David Cameron has placed the NHS on a fast track to fragmentation and privatisation.

“The next election presents the last chance to change course.”

Private companies, NHS trusts and voluntary groups have been invited by the NHS strategic projects team to show “expressions of interest”.



Accused: David Cameron

The deal has been split into two parts – a £687million contract to run cancer services and a £535million contract to provide end-of-life care.

The contracts, which will run for 10 years, have been given “pioneer” status by the NHS because of their size.

Dr Clive Peedell, co-founder of the National Health Action party, said: “I am particularly concerned that if private companies end up running major cancer services, they will aim to concentrate on the more common, less complex cancers that are easier to diagnose and treat.

"There could be a dangerous knock-on effect.

“Privatisation could drag expert staff and resources away from existing NHS cancer centres, leaving them less able to cope with patients with the less common cancers.”

Last year the Daily Mirror revealed how the number of NHS patients suffering botched surgery by private firms was increasing as more services were privatised.

While NHS spending on non-NHS providers increased from 2010/11 to 2011/12 by 10%, the number of botched cases went up by 29% and the amount of compensation paid out increased by 24%, our figures revealed.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-privatisation-david-cameron-accused-3227821#ixzz2vgrlEtwM
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     This is just too sinister for words, what profit for a private company would there be in this area.....How many people that they kill off.

Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him!


Plus the bill that has just gone through that they can close down hospitals that are doing well just because another hospital isn't.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him!


Bloody Bastard! The NHS is safe in our hands - no it sodding isn't!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sassy wrote:Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him!


Plus the bill that has just gone through that they can close down hospitals that are doing well just because another hospital isn't.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him!


Bloody Bastard!    The NHS is safe in our hands - no it sodding isn't!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That bill was brought in because Lewisham hospital won it's battle against closure, and the government doesn't want to be embarrassed again.     

We've got the fucking Nazis in charge.

That is exactly right, as acknowledged by some of the coalition MPs who voted against it. I believe someone said that if a burglar gets sentenced he can't change the law, the Government can and does. He also said, what applies to burglars should apply to the Government.

Sassy wrote:That is exactly right, as acknowledged by some of the coalition MPs who voted against it.   I believe someone said that if a burglar gets sentenced he can't change the law, the Government can and does.   He also said, what applies to burglars should apply to the Government.

In the final days of labours last reign they signed a huge number of PFI deals for the NHS on incredibly poor terms. They were giving public money away to the private sector. Had the Tories done that I would have been ashamed. How well you expunge from your minds Labours transgressions.

Oh please post details from verifiable sources, I'd love to chastise them about it and make sure it never happens again.

Sassy wrote:Oh please post details from verifiable sources, I'd love to chastise them about it and make sure it never happens again.

FFS be real even the BBC reported upon it. Look yourself you lazy Kyler.

kevins58 wrote:

Sassy wrote:Oh please post details from verifiable sources, I'd love to chastise them about it and make sure it never happens again.

FFS be real even the BBC reported upon it. Look yourself you lazy Kyler.

Well, from that we can deduce it was all bluster and that Drinky as normal, is a rude disgusting jerk with an inferiority complex as big as a house.

kevins58 wrote:

Sassy wrote:That is exactly right, as acknowledged by some of the coalition MPs who voted against it.   I believe someone said that if a burglar gets sentenced he can't change the law, the Government can and does.   He also said, what applies to burglars should apply to the Government.

In the final days of labours last reign they signed a huge number of PFI deals for the NHS on incredibly poor terms. They were giving public money away to the private sector. Had the Tories done that I would have been ashamed. How well you expunge from your minds Labours transgressions.

It was the Tories that came up with PFI and Osborne used PFI more times in his first two years than Labour did in their 13 years.

Didn't you know that?

Sassy wrote:

kevins58 wrote:

FFS be real even the BBC reported upon it. Look yourself you lazy Kyler.

Well, from that we can deduce it was all bluster and that Drinky as normal, is a rude disgusting jerk with an inferiority complex as big as a house.

It was and remains a fact which was even debated on these forums at the time. Get off your fat arse. It isn't worth my effort for you.

BTW are you arguing you haven't got a fat arse or whether Labour signed the deals in the last month?

Irn Bru wrote:

kevins58 wrote:

In the final days of labours last reign they signed a huge number of PFI deals for the NHS on incredibly poor terms. They were giving public money away to the private sector. Had the Tories done that I would have been ashamed. How well you expunge from your minds Labours transgressions.

It was the Tories that came up with PFI and Osborne used PFI more times in his first two years than Labour did in their 13 years.

Didn't you know that?

I do not deny the Tories created PFI, I never have. Labour showed in spades how to do it badly Irn Bru.

kevins58 wrote:

Sassy wrote:

Well, from that we can deduce it was all bluster and that Drinky as normal, is a rude disgusting jerk with an inferiority complex as big as a house.

It was and remains a fact which was even debated on these forums at the time. Get off your fat arse. It isn't worth my effort for you.

BTW are you arguing you haven't got a fat arse or whether Labour signed the deals in the last month?

You know, the only person Jeremy Kyle is applicable for is you. You really are a creep.

kevins58 wrote:

Irn Bru wrote:

kevins58 wrote:

In the final days of labours last reign they signed a huge number of PFI deals for the NHS on incredibly poor terms. They were giving public money away to the private sector. Had the Tories done that I would have been ashamed. How well you expunge from your minds Labours transgressions.

It was the Tories that came up with PFI and Osborne used PFI more times in his first two years than Labour did in their 13 years.

Didn't you know that?

I do not deny the Tories created PFI, I never have. Labour showed in spades how to do it badly Irn Bru.

And Osborne's deals were what?

And give me a list of the PFI contracts that Labour signed off in the last month they were in power.

Something else Drinky doesn't want to face up to.

Sassy wrote:Something else Drinky doesn't want to face up to.

George Osborne backs 61 PFI projects despite earlier doubts over costing

Chancellor discredited funding mechanism in opposition but has pushed forward PFIs worth £6.9bn since election

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osborne-backs-pfi-projects

Along the same lines as 'the NHS is safe in our hands' - until we get hold of it!!!!!!!!!!!!

00:21:3400:21:34

We lost the NHS when bliar moved into No 10.............................

He wanted all to be equal and that was the demise of our front line services......

Instead of the money going where it should have he poured into the hands of the neo Conservatives......

gerber wrote:00:21:3400:21:34

We lost the NHS when bliar moved into No 10.............................

He wanted all to be equal and that was the demise of our front line services......

Instead of the money going where it should have he poured into the hands of the neo Conservatives......

No I'm sorry Gerber but that just isn't true. The Tories left the NHS and it's infrastructure in a hell of a state through lack of investment in vital services leaving patients waiting months for vital operations. We had portakabins being used to try and cover the deficiencies instead of building new hospitals to replace ageing buildings that were no longer fit for purpose. If you can show me a list of new projects relating to building up the NHS infrastructure and the services that it is supposed to provide then I would think you could count them on one hand.

Irn Bru wrote:

gerber wrote:00:21:3400:21:34

We lost the NHS when bliar moved into No 10.............................

He wanted all to be equal and that was the demise of our front line services......

Instead of the money going where it should have he poured into the hands of the neo Conservatives......

No I'm sorry Gerber but that just isn't true. The Tories left the NHS and it's infrastructure in a hell of a state through lack of investment in vital services leaving patients waiting months for vital operations. We had portakabins being used to try and cover the deficiencies instead of building new hospitals to replace ageing buildings that were no longer fit for purpose. If you can show me a list of new projects relating to building up the NHS infrastructure and the services that it is supposed to provide then I would think you could count them on one hand.

The PFI have crippled the NHS. Payments that need to be made now have left hospitals and the trusts that were formed bancrupt. It was we pay you in the future but you build now.......... We look good and then in ten years the faith you have shown to us we will repay you hundred fold in cash terms.

Sassy wrote:Something else Drinky doesn't want to face up to.

Your enormous arse or the scandal over the number of deals signed. I shall find them for Irn Bru I can't be bothered for a Jeremy Kyle trailer trash bird however.

Like an iceberg, the extent of the damage wrought by the last Labour government is still becoming apparent.

One of the wheezes Labour used to camouflage its vast spending spree was the Private Finance Initiative. These had been brought in by John Major’s Conservatives (to criticism from the then Labour opposition) and involved a private sector entity building something and then selling it or leasing back to the government over a number of years, usually decades.

Upon winning the election in 1997 however, Labour performed a volte face and embraced PFIs. They appealed to Gordon Brown because the liabilities taken on under PFIs would not show up on the government’s balance sheet. In other words, they wouldn’t be included in the national debt figure.

Labour signed up to an estimated £229 billion of PFI projects. That’s almost two and a half times the entire projected budget deficit for 2012 – 2013, or 16 percent of GDP.

And all of it was off the books. This enables Labour supporters to argue that “Public sector net debt (as a percentage of GDP) FELL from the start of Labour’s time in government until the beginning of the global financial crisis”. But, if you include the PFI liabilities the Labour government signed us up to, any fiscal improvement during their time in office vanishes and this already thin argument does likewise.



Perhaps Brown was stupid and/or hubristic enough to believe he really had banished “Tory boom and bust”. Perhaps he calculated that he would be long gone before the bills for PFI landed on the mat. Either way, while in the long run Brown is (thankfully) politically dead, we taxpayers are not.

Last week it emerged that six NHS trusts were facing bankruptcy thanks to the PFI deals struck by the Labour government. As the Telegraph reported

“The total value of the NHS buildings built by Labour under the scheme is £11.4bn. But the bill, which will also include fees for maintenance, cleaning and portering, will come to more than £70bn on current projections and will not be paid off until 2049...Some trusts are spending up to a fifth of their budget servicing the mortgages...Across the public sector, taxpayers are committed to paying £229bn for hospitals, schools, roads and other projects with a capital value of £56bn”

Indeed, like the cat who leaves little ‘presents’ around the house for you to discover when you return from holiday, the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 is the gift that keeps on crapping on your carpet. We will be discovering fiscal turds left by Labour for literally decades to come.

If you were being charitable you would ascribe the fiscal incontinence of the Blair/Brown governments to some sort of Keynesian economic theory, though that fails to explain why they applied fiscal ‘stimulus’ for seven years to an already growing economy.

If you were being slightly less charitable you might ascribe it to incompetence of a quite staggering degree. The last Labour government, after all, were probably the biggest set of mediocre idiots ever to govern this country.


And, if you were being even less charitable, you might ascribe it to something more sinister – Brown poisoning the wells when he heard opposition tanks at the end of his strasse.

The architects of this national disaster have moved on. Blair is swanning around the globe earning millions. Brown is off brooding somewhere and probably enjoying it. Ed Balls, Brown’s right hand man through all this, is now, incredibly, Labour’s shadow minister for the economy!

We will have to live with the consequences of their mismanagement for years, why should they get away scot free? When we look at the continuing harm the Blair/Brown governments did to Britain shouldn’t we consider some sort of economic Nuremberg for these people? To punish them, Blair, Brown, and Balls, for the harm they have done to the British public?

Of course, you could argue that the electorate is responsible for electing these dangerous cretins. After all, every single majority Labour government in history has left office (in 1931, 1951, 1970, 1979, and 2010) with the economy in meltdown. Assuming that Labour voters aren’t so stupid that they don’t know this you have to conclude that they simply don’t care if the economy collapses.

In the wake of the Barclays rate fixing scandal, Ed Miliband has called for a full public inquiry into the banking industry, saying, “If you go out and nick £50 from Tesco, you are punished, at least we hope that you are punished – if you fiddle, lie, cheat to the tune of millions of pounds, you should also have the full force of the law brought against you.”

As Britain’s economy continues to smoulder isn’t it time for Miliband’s former colleagues in the wretched Labour government of 1997 to 2010, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed Balls, to face a reckoning for the continuing damage they wrought upon the nation?

John Phelan is a Contributing Editor for The Commentator and a Fellow at the Cobden Centre. He has also written for City AM and Conservative Home and he blogs at Manchester Liberal. Follow him on Twitter at @TheBoyPhelan

Read more on: New Labour, Labour government 1997, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, ed balls, labour's economic performance, Private Finance Initiative, The Brown years, the Blair years, labour, labour party, Labour spin, NHS PFI initiatives, keynesianism, Labour's economic incompetence, ed miliband, Ed Miliband and barclays, john phelan, and John Phelan and Labour








57

Yesterday afternoon, the Queen opened the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen. She will doubtless have been impressed: the facility, the first to be built in Northern Ireland for more than a decade, is a gleaming shrine to 21st-century healthcare. What may not have been mentioned, however, was that the £276 million hospital was constructed not with public funds, but by a consortium under the Private Finance Initiative – and that the deal to build it included a 30-year “facilities management” contract for one of the firms involved.


The Enniskillen deal may be a shining example of value for money. But many PFI contracts are not. Ministers are on the verge of taking over the South London Healthcare Trust, after it proved unable to cope with a bill of more than £60 million a year in interest alone. One of the trust’s three hospitals, the Princess Royal in Bromley, took £118 million to build, yet will cost roughly £1.2 billion. All told, Labour signed 103 PFI deals for the NHS, at a value of £11.4 billion and an eventual price of more than £65 billion. The diversion of that money away from patient care will put inexorable pressure on budgets, to the point where some hospitals will crack under the strain.


PFI, in short, is not merely about £22 light bulbs and £875 Christmas trees – it is about budgetary incompetence on a monumental scale. And it comes as little surprise that it can be traced back to Gordon Brown, who turbo-charged the Tories’ fledgling public-private partnerships in order to buy schools, hospitals and more on the never-never. This allowed him first to evade spending restrictions, and later to splurge on public-sector salaries; in the mean time, the credit card bills got higher and higher.


Many PFI deals delivered what was promised – but where things have gone wrong, as in Bromley, the contracts were often drawn up so poorly that there is little the Coalition can do. Ministers have renegotiated some deals to claw back costs, and should make every effort, and twist every arm, to do more. They should also remind voters of the ignominious parts played in this debacle by Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls. But, above all, they need urgently to produce a way of funding infrastructure that draws on the private sector’s strengths rather than exploiting the public sector’s weaknesses. Jesse Norman, the Tory MP who has led the way in exposing PFI’s flaws, points out that the state must spend more than £200 billion on new infrastructure over the coming decade, and cannot do so without private help. The Treasury is beavering away on a new model of funding. If it repeats the errors made by Labour, the cost to the nation will be heavy indeed.

Don’t sign, hospitals warned before PFI deal

An NHS hospital trust was officially warned not to sign the £500 million PFI deal that left it on the brink of bankruptcy, an independent report discloses.







Rowena Mason
By Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent

10:00PM BST 27 Jun 2012



Comments64 Comments





Peterborough and Stamford NHS Foundation Trust should never have agreed a deal to obtain funding from private companies in 2007, it says.


Monitor, the hospital regulator, warned that there was “significant doubt” that the deal was affordable before the former Labour government approved the private funding. The trust, which runs two hospitals, is now saddled with huge interest payments.


It had to be given a bail-out of more than £40 million by the Government, after admitting it would not otherwise be able to pay its staff.


Peterborough and Stamford is the second trust to face financial catastrophe. The Government said earlier this week that it would have to send administrators in to the South London Healthcare Trust.


NHS trusts running more than 60 hospitals are in serious financial trouble and at risk of being taken over by Whitehall troubleshooters. The report into Peterborough and Stamford raises fresh concerns about the long-term effects of PFI deals waved through by Labour.


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Accountants from KPMG found that the trust’s management had prepared “inaccurate” budgets and its figures “did not reflect a realistic expectation of actual events and costs”.

The trust did not realise that it had an annual £44 million black hole in its budget until last year, around six months before it required financial help.

The sum is equivalent to more than a fifth of the trust’s annual £200 million turnover. The report also says that Monitor had “very limited” power to stop the trust signing the unaffordable deal.

The regulator raised its concerns in January 2007, copying in the Department of Health under Andy Burnham, now the shadow health secretary.

“We believe the long-term affordability of the proposal to be in significant doubt,” it said at the time.

It reiterated this view in even stronger terms in April of the same year, when it raised “significant concerns as to the scheme’s affordability”.

But the deal was signed in June 2007 and the trust’s finances went downhill.

Within three years, it had breached the 18-week waiting time target, and by February 2010, there were concerns regarding A&E care. In May 2010, it reported a third consecutive breach of cancer waiting time targets.

Coalition sources said that the “disastrous” blunder by the previous government had brought the hospital almost “to its knees”.

“Labour were warned repeatedly by their own regulator that this dodgy PFI deal could bankrupt Peterborough hospital but they pressed on regardless,” the source said. “Since we announced bold action to clear up the mess left to us by Labour in South London, Andy Burnham has repeatedly tried to deflect the blame. But his fingerprints are all over this.

“He was the minister responsible for the deal and he should now apologise to the staff and patients in Peterborough for the chaos he caused.”

Under the Coalition’s health reforms, the regulator will have more power to step in if an NHS trust is about to sign a risky deal.

The point is that PFI was used to hide Labours spending spree. Because it was off book they were able to under report actual committed expenditure when they bust us they really bust us.

Still looking for the list signed in the last month of office it's there somewhere.