A new report from The Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) examines the profits that PFI companies have made from the NHS in recent years.
P.F.I – Profiting from Infirmaries finds that over the past six years the companies holding PFI contracts to build and run NHS hospitals and other facilities have made pre-tax profits of £831m – money which the CHPI says has therefore been unavailable for patient care.
According to the CHPI, if the NHS had not been paying pre-tax profits on PFI schemes, the deficits in NHS hospitals would have been reduced by a quarter over this six year period.
The report goes on to recommend a number of ways in which the Government and NHS can work together to curtail excess profits in the future.
These include:
- Using public sector loans to buy-out PFI contracts.
- Taxing PFI companies to recoup some of the profits which have been made.
- Capping the amount of profit which can be made by a private company which has an exclusive public-sector contract with the NHS.
- Sharing out the profits made from sales of equity stakes in PFI contracts.
- Mandating greater transparency of equity sales to prevent the unnoticed consolidation of market power by a small number of investors.
- Re-negotiating contracts with the private companies to reduce the amounts the NHS has to pay.
Colin Leys, one of the chairmen of the CHPI, told the BBC: "This report shows for the first time the huge amount of taxpayers' money which is leaking out of the NHS through the profits generated by PFI companies.
"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."
A Department of Health spokeswoman 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.
"The first PFI contracts for NHS hospitals, which were signed in 1997, range between 25 and 30 years. This report analyses just six years of contracts and, as a result, does not represent the full picture."
