Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, (a) what arrangements her Department has in place to help ensure that hospital trusts who have entered PFI contracts for buildings remain able to afford interest payments on those contracts and (b) what recent assessment she has made of the adequacy of those arrangements in the context of rising inflation and interest rates.

The Department and NHS England are in regular discussions with National Health Service trusts over their financial affairs and this would include the impact of inflation on trusts’ contracts.

This Government has taken decisive action in response to the inflationary pressures on the NHS. On top of the additional funding of £3.3 billion from the 2022 Autumn Statement in each of the next two years NHS England has provided an additional £1.5 billion in funding to the NHS in 2022/23. This has been added to system allocations and is covering a range of pressures reported by systems including energy costs, higher costs of consumables, and the cost of PFI contracts that are tied to the retail price index.

The payments due under NHS PFI contracts are not subject to changes in interest rates. In 2023/24 the funding issued to the NHS, and reflected in the NHS payment scheme cost uplift factor, takes account of inflationary pressures in 2022/23 as well as further growth to account for expected non-pay inflation and energy price increases in 2023/24.