Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to paragraph 5.12 of the Government Response to the Naylor Review, published in January 2018, what steps he has taken to (a) renegotiate and (b) replace PFI schemes.

This Government has undertaken a number of initiatives and will continue to assist National Health Service trusts to look for ways to reduce their Private Finance Initiative (PFI) commitments.

The Department has helped and advised local trust contract managers where requested in relation to PFI contractual issues and also to support trusts in making operational savings in their PFI schemes. Final decisions however about the level and quality of these services are best made at a local level where these services interact with local delivery activities.

Opportunities for re-financing PFI schemes are being investigated, although these are now comparatively limited given the nature of the financial instruments used by the PFI companies at the time. We have also looked very carefully at cases for terminating PFI schemes – a buy out – but in following Treasury guidance this has generally proved not to be value for money or affordable.

One of the first things the Government did in 2010 was to begin an initiative to extract savings and better value for money at all the signed and operational PFI contracts.