Posted on 2017-10-02 | 11:27

Roger has welcomed the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s pledge to end the ongoing scandal of huge profits being sucked out of the NHS by private companies running PFI projects. McDonnell has said that a Labour Government would bring existing contracts under the Private Finance Initiative “back in-house”.

Said Roger: “I welcome the shadow Chancellor’s remarks. It is about time that the UK took steps to end the flow of money out of our NHS and into the deep pockets of private contractors. As I have been saying for a long time, PFI contracts were a grotesque waste of public funds. They resulted in us paying way over the odds for essential public buildings, which would have been much cheaper to finance from government borrowing because the UK Government can always borrow money more cheaply than the private sector. In Birmingham, the cost of the QE hospital was £627 million, but the repayments will come to £2.58 billion over 35 years. This is clearly not a sensible or efficient use of public funds—unless your goal is for public funds to be diverted into private profits! Why should taxpayers have to keep paying these inflated charges while the NHS crumbles from lack of funding?

“The warning by Caroline Fairburn, the CBI Director General, that ‘business’ will be unhappy if existing PFI contracts were brought back is nothing more than a self-serving ‘whinge’. What she is really saying is that she and her friends knows that these PFI contracts are very bad value for money for tax payers but they provide handsome profits for investors, including many hedge funds who are registered in tax havens and, therefore, pay hardly anything towards UK taxes.

“I also support McDonnell’s plans to stop firms which are profiting from PFI contracts from being listed in tax havens. At the very least, companies which are profiting from the British taxpayer should be forced to be listed in the UK and to declare the full extent of their profits.”