BARTS Health NHS Trust, the biggest hospital trust in the country, will go £134.9 million in the red by the end of March according to figures released by the Tory health minster Alistair Burt.
Barts, which comprises six hospitals including the large Whipps Cross in North East London, is not alone in facing financial bankruptcy. Burt also revealed that London North West Healthcare NHS Trust, which includes Ealing and Northwick Park hospitals, has debts of £88.3 million.
In fact every London hospital is mired in debt. In total it is estimated that the debt of London hospitals by March (the end of the financial year) will be £492.9 million. Prof Chris Ham, chief executive of the health think tank, the King’s Fund, said of these figures: ‘These forecast deficits provide further evidence of the escalating financial crisis in the NHS, as well as the longstanding challenges facing London’s health system. In the case of Barts, these pressures have been exacerbated by the costs of a major PFI development.’
In 2006, Barts signed up to a £1.1 billion deal to rebuild hospitals financed by the private sector under terms which tied the trust into 43 years of repayment at usurious rates of interest repayments. It is calculated that by the time the PFI deal comes to an end the £1.1 billion will have cost the trust at least £6.5 billion more.
This money is being sucked out of every NHS hospital saddled with a PFI deal, money that goes directly into the pockets of the banks who bought up these deals. Barts may be the biggest NHS trust tied to an unrepayable debt under PFI but it is not the only one, there are about 720 PFI contracts covering the NHS and other public building projects.
The effects of these massive debts accrued under PFI, along with the continuous cuts in government funding by the previous coalition and now the Tory government, have been felt in hospitals over the past few years. Hospital wards and whole departments have been closed down in a futile battle to balance the books, as the Tories demand, under the guise of ‘rationalisation’.
This has seen countless A&E departments, maternity units and all the other departments that make up a general hospital closed. Ealing Hospital, which did not have a PFI deal and was previously on a sound financial footing, has been lumbered with the huge PFI debt of Northwick Park hospital when they merged to form the London North West Healthcare NHS Trust in 2014.
This has led already to the closure of the vital maternity unit and the impending closure of the A&E, part of the plan to transform a modern much-needed hospital into some form of walk-in centre. This programme of closure has been repeated across London including closures of A&E departments in Hammersmith Hospital, Chase Farm, Central Middlesex and countless others.
None of this programme of bankrupting the NHS is happening by accident. It represents a deliberate policy by the Tories to create the conditions for the wholesale privatisation of the NHS.
First bankrupt the hospital trusts, then place them in ‘special measures’ as Barts was last year when staff shortages led to it being declared ‘inadequate’ because it was forced to run with dangerously low levels of staffing, overcrowding and bed shortages as a result of its debts.
The next step for the Tories is to privatise all these hospitals. Behind this is the drive by the Tories to pay off the national debt run up bailing out the banks since 2008 by ending all spending on the NHS.
The NHS cannot be defended by petitions or pleas to the Tories, the working class must take action with a campaign of occupations and strikes to prevent closures. Patients and workers must be united in Councils of Action to organise these campaigns.
Alongside this must be the fight to force the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and the privateers and bring in a workers government that will repudiate all debt and advance to a socialist society.
