Thank you, Mr Gray; I am grateful to you for accommodating me. I declare an interest as a private member of Unite the union.
The level of involvement of private interests that has built up in our NHS over decades is deeply troublesome. That concern has been expressed forcefully in the demands set out in the petition that we are debating. That petition has garnered more than 135,000 signatures.
In our manifesto at the last election, Labour stated:
“Our urgent priority is to end NHS privatisation”,
because
“Every penny spent on privatisation and outsourcing is a penny less spent on patient care.”
We committed to repealing the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and reinstating the responsibilities of the Secretary of State to provide a comprehensive and universal healthcare system. We also committed to ending the requirement on health authorities to put services out to competitive tender, to ensure that services are delivered in-house and that subsidiary companies are brought back in-house.
In the moments remaining to me, I will address the issue of the private finance initiative. The hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) set out a lot of the detail very accurately. He told us about a hospital in my constituency, the James Cook University Hospital, and I pay tribute to the work of all its team, ably led by Sue Page, the chief executive. That hospital has performed marvels during this period, and offered services to other hospitals across the entire north of England.
I am appealing to the Minister for some help for my hospital, because the burden of PFI has been absolutely colossal: the hospital has cost £1.5 billion to build and maintain since it opened in 2003. The amounts paid by the trust increase every year until the final payment in 2034. I do not want to get into debate about how rotten the PFI deal was, quite frankly. All PFI deals were rotten. They were started in 1992 under John Major’s Government—please, let us not have any of that nonsense. The PFI deal costs an absolute fortune: £20 million more than an equivalent hospital would have to pay for maintenance.
What was missing is what we are going to do about it. As an initial solution, we could look at the decisive action of the Department of Health in 2012 to make £1.5 billion available in grants—not loans—to seven hospitals in England with some of the heaviest PFI debts through a stability fund. The seven trusts were able to use that money, rather than their usual budgets, to meet their PFI payments. It has been done elsewhere. I appeal to the Minister to look very carefully at providing assistance to get this PFI albatross from around our neck and let my hospital thrive and continue to do the wonderful work it has done for many years.
7.16 pm