Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the cost to the public purse has been of (a) capital and (b) private finance initiative projects in the NHS and social care services in England in each year for which data is recorded.

A time-series of total public capital spending against the Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL), since 2007-08, is recorded as an annex to the Department of Health Annual Report and Accounts 2015-16. The following table summarises the Capital DEL outturn for these years.

Information relating to all Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects in the National Health Service and social care in England is available on the Treasury’s website, via:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/private-finance-initiative-and-private-finance-2-projects-2015-summary-data

The capital cost figures are for the initial construction cost. 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 following table shows the latest published PFI revenue payments for hospital and social care schemes.

The recorded spend through Capital DEL includes expenditure on IT and equipment assets, whereas the spend recorded as PFI is focused on delivering serviced hospital buildings. Where buildings are delivered with Capital DEL funding they also incur significant costs in maintenance, cleaning etc but the Department does not retain a record of these costs.