News / Labour Party promises it would scrap PFI

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell (pictured)  told his party’s annual conference in Brighton that the PFI had led to ‘huge, long-term costs for taxpayers’. 

‘In the NHS alone, £831m in pre-tax profits have been made over the past six years. As early as 2002, this conference regretted the use of PFI,’ he said.

‘We’ll put an end to this scandal and reduce the cost to the taxpayers. We have already pledged that there will be no new PFI deals signed by us. But we will go further. We’ll bring existing PFI contracts back in-house.’

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth added that the NHS needed additional winter funding. ‘To avoid another winter like the one we’ve just had, we would establish a £0.5bn emergency winter fund, so patients and their families never suffer like that again.’

The Department of Health has allocated a further £13m to 19 hospitals in capital funding to help trusts improve patient flow in A&E this winter. The funding – initially announced in the spring Budget – will be used for equipment or infrastructure to iron out issues in patient flow. 

The Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable (pictured) warned that 10,000 European Union workers had quit the NHS in the year after the vote to leave the EU. 

He said: ‘We are losing thousands of high-quality nurses and doctors from the NHS, driven partly by this government’s heartless approach to the Brexit talks. 

‘Using EU nationals as bargaining chips is not only morally wrong, it is utterly counter-productive and damaging to our NHS.’

• Healthcare Finance went to press before the Conservative Party conference began