NHS England: Private Finance Initiative
(asked on 17th October 2016) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much NHS England spent as a proportion of its budget in PFI repayments each year since the first such repayment was made.
Individual National Health Service trusts, NHS foundations trusts (‘NHS Providers’) and NHS Property Services Ltd make the payments from their overall income for the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes they are individually accountable and responsible for under the contract. NHS England’s budget and expenditure is principally to commission services from NHS Providers either directly or through clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), but also from non-NHS providers (e.g. private and voluntary sector) as well as public health and primary care providers (e.g. general practitioners).
The latest published information for the overall cost projections for all PFI schemes is available on the Treasury’s website, via:
The Treasury table shows that for the 106 NHS PFI schemes that have now been signed, the estimated total revenue payments (over the lifetime of their contracts) are £79.0 billion (in nominal terms i.e. including an inflation assumption). This is from the date of the first construction completions in 2000-01 to the date of the very last payment in 2049-50. The revenue payment figures include not just the financing costs (debt repayment and interest) for initial construction but also the costs of all the other services such as building maintenance and support services (cleaning, catering, portering etc) provided over the lifetime of the contract. The payments are subject to meeting agreed performance and quality standards and include an annual uprate assumption for inflation of 2.5%.
The total PFI payment made by NHS Providers for 2015-16 was £1.9 billion, which represents 2.4% of total budgeted expenditure of NHS Providers.