Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood has called for the ban on Private Finance Initiative in the Welsh NHS to be extended across all devolved areas of spending.
The AM for South Wales Central recently called for Education Minister Leighton Andrews to turn his back on the controversial policy.
Reports of the debt burden faced by the English NHS have shown how disastrous PFI has been across the border and underlined the merit of the Welsh NHS approach.
Figures obtained by the BBC show that 103 PFI schemes, originally valued at £11.3bn when they were built, will now cost the NHS in England £65.1bn over the lifetime of the schemes. In some cases, the repayments amounted to more than 10% of a Trust’s turnover.
The GMB union subsequently claimed the financial woes of the English NHS Trusts were merely the tip of the iceberg as far as PFI was concerned with the cost of more than 650 PFI projects reaching £230 billion – a debt they say would not be fully paid off until 2048.
At the Senedd this week, Ms Wood told Jane Hutt, the Minister for Business and Budget: “This form of funding cannot be justified, as it is unaffordable and merely shifts debt—millions of pounds of it—on to our children and our children’s children.
“With public spending about to be squeezed in the comprehensive spending review next week, will you resist this false economy in the future?”
In her reply, Ms Hutt did not rule out Private Finance Initiative.
