Nicola Grant Workers Party has expressed concern following reports that the Labour Government is considering Public-Private funding for the NHS. Ministers will be making a final decision in the autumn budget about whether to use this funding approach which was put on pause eight years ago. Ms. Grant said even the Tories knew this was not a good deal for the public purse.
Ms. Grant continued lessons have not been learned about the pitfalls of PPPs, have they forgotten the chaos unleashed by the 2018 collapse of the mega-contractor Carillion. Labour in the past has made significant use of private finance initiatives (PFI) to build schools, hospitals, and other public infrastructure, but the taxpayer was often left footing the bill for inflexible contracts that ran for as long as 30 years. This type of deal never represents value for money to the public purse. They have been widely used in Northern Ireland in the past in hospitals, schools, and in fact one school in West Belfast closed a few years after being opened and the education department was tied into a 25-year contract and had to continue payments until the contract ended. Union’s general secretary has warned that basing any funding on a failed market system would be a major mistake especially as the government claims that money is tight.
Research this year from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research looked at a thousand schools built through PFI. It found that £13.5bn was being spent at local level on repayments, 31%. Of which was going on interest payments, certainly not value for money for the public. Max Mosley at the New Economics Foundation says when these projects fail it carries devastating consequences, from huge costs levied on hospitals, to -state -of -the -art schools having to close. Ms. Grant added the Workers Party is calling on the Executive Parties and the scrutiny committees to ensure that we in Northern Ireland have learned the lessons of the past and use the traditional procurement processes that is value for money by using government capital funding.
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