Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to assist hospital trusts to reduce or restructure costs borne as a result of private finance initiatives.

We are providing the seven worst affected trusts with Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes, access to a £1.5 billion support fund over a period of 25 years; funding started from 2013-14.

One of the first things this Government did in 2010 was to launch a review of the previous Government’s PFIs and begin an initiative to extract savings and better value for money at all the PFI contracts they had signed and are now open. In 2014 it was reported that trusts had negotiated validated savings worth over £250 million on their contracts. This savings work is ongoing, with Departmental officials helping local trusts as required.