This week’s Queens Speech formally outlined the planned construction of “40 new NHS hospitals”. Boris Johnson, in his introduction to the speech, told us he was “proud to be the midwife to the biggest hospital building programme in a generation”. It’s naked electioneering, of course. But there are other reasons to be concerned about what Johnson is actually delivering.
The death of PFI has been greatly exaggerated
The last time we heard such grandiose promises for the NHS was in 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour swept to victory promising new hospitals and reduced waiting times – and to do so without increasing the UK public debt. It sounded too good to be true, and Pretty F*cking Inevitably, it was.
The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was set up in 1991 under John Major & Norman Lamont - with a young David Cameron as his adviser. From transport and prisons, New Labour quickly expanded it into schools, NHS hospitals, housing, defence, and other key parts of the public sector, aided by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)’s ‘Building Better Partnerships’ Commission and backed by the City of London, already warmed to Blair’s New Labour project via the infamous ‘prawn cocktail offensive’. What we got as a result was an enormously expensive ‘buy now, pay later’ credit card for building public infrastructure.
