NHS Annual Report and Care Objectives

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. When the shadow Secretary of State was attempting to suggest that there were trusts in trouble across the country, he might have had the humility to admit that the hospital trusts in the greatest difficulty are the ones that were saddled with unsustainable debt by the Labour Government’s poorly negotiated PFI projects. He might have instanced Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Monitor wrote to him and his colleagues, telling them that that PFI project should not have proceeded. The Labour Government went ahead with it anyway and it is now unsustainable.

We have been very clear. We have gone through a process of identifying where trusts can manage, not least with us assisting them. In the latter part of last year we identified seven trusts that we will step in and support if we believe that they are otherwise unable to restore their finances to good health. It will entail about £1.5 billion of total support for them to be able to pay for their PFI projects. Where there are opportunities for renegotiation we will exercise them, but unfortunately it is in the nature of coming into government that we inherit what the previous Government left us. We were left with 102 hospital—[Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State says from a sedentary position that they were our PFI schemes. No NHS PFI scheme was signed before the Labour Government took office in 1997. Two years ago we inherited 102 hospital projects with £73 billion of debt, yet the Opposition thought that in the years before they had used taxpayers’ money to build these new hospitals. No, they did not. They saddled the NHS for 30 years with that debt.

[Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Talking about waste, will the Secretary of State explain why his Department has wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds on consultancy fees looking at my acute trust, and why his Department refuses to publish the reports? Could it be that they are a complete waste of time?

[Mr Lansley]

In the year before the election the Department of Health spent about £110 million on consultancy and we reduced it to £10 million. I will tell the hon. Gentleman about waste. In the past two years we have already racked up £1.4 billion of administration savings across the NHS—money that goes straight back into the front line. The Department is having to do work in relation to the hon. Gentleman’s hospital at Whiston only because of the PFI deal that his Government signed before the last election. We will have to help St Helen’s and Knowsley trust deal with that debt in the future.