More than 60 hospitals cannot afford the rising cost of private finance initiative schemes and are being left "on the brink of financial collapse", says Health Secretary Andrew Lansley – in a convenient bit of grandstanding just prior to the Tory paty conference.

He is telling is that trusts are now unable to pay for their schemes - believed to be worth more than £5.4 billion in total - because the payments of their "NHS mortgages" have inflated during the recession.

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The National Programme for IT was always going to be a disaster right from the start. I had some slight contact with those involved at the beginning, and it was absolutely clear it had zero chance of success. Too big, too complicated, too ambitious, too full of untried technology. The tender was kept secret and only released to a few favoured firms.
If you worked for one of the companies bidding, your only option was to go along with it, and pretend, at least when the bosses were around, that it had every chance of success. Doubts and criticisms were completely unwelcome.
The leaders of the bids and project teams in the private sector got where they were not because of competence, but because they were good at conning themselves and others that the impossible was possible. The trick played by the more competent managers was to make sure that when the whole thing went belly-up as they secretly anticipated, their companies would not be left with a loss.
As for the managers in the public sector who authorised this shambles, you can rest assured it has not damaged their careers in any way and they have moved on to pastures new where they are doubtless giving free reign to their delusions once again.

I could sit here and read a multitude of info as to how we are being "not best served" by those we actually pay to look after the affairs of state, the management so to speak.
Volumes are written, first hand experiences are widespread, pockets are constantly plundered and generally we are paying for TPTB to make our lives a nightmare on every front.

For myself, it is quite simple, my default attitude is to starve the beast , at every opportunity, regardless of opposition, regardless of status, regardless of what others think, in spite of any threat and to my total satisfaction of putting a spanner in the works.

Frankly, if you are not doing all you can to bugger up the works, you, yes you are part of the problem.

The £500,000,000 wasted on 9 English regional fire stations was the fault of those trying to Balkanise the country for the benefit of the EU, which likes to subdivide and conquer.

Under the private-finance initiative (PFI), hospitals can be built on the “never never”. But they end up costing billions more and, during their decades-long mortgage, they attract non-negotiable service charges (eg £10 to change a lightbulb) from the lender-landlord. Five years ago even the Guardian reported that PFI “will cost taxpayers an extra £45billion over the next three decades… the eventual repayments for 83 hospital building projects worth £8billion will total £53billion under PFI…” Much of the country’s public services – including schools – are in nightmare contracts such as these. The economists who include PFI in their calculations of the UK’s total debt estimate it at over £4 trillion, rather than the official figure of a little under £1 trillion.

The Tories pioneered PFI in the 90s - around the time of Maastricht - and this method of financing was embraced even more enthusiastically by New Labour, which showed a worrying lack of interest in getting value for taxpayers’ money. Why? So that Chancellor Gordon Brown could say that spending was lower than it was (by spreading out the splurge over decades, with little to show for it) and therefore “sustainable”.

Who decides what’s “sustainable”? The EU. Brown was enthusiastic for UK entry into the euro from before he was chancellor – that’s why in his first month in office he gave our central bank independence, a condition of euro entry – until well into Labour’s second term. It’s very likely that he was - as was Major before him - trying to stick to the other conditions of the single currency, set out first in the Maastricht Treaty.

These rules (the stability-and-growth pact) – keeping the deficit below three per cent of GDP (ahem), debt below 60 per cent of GDP and inflation below 2 per cent – apply also to non-euro countries, who are told off rather than fined if they break them. You can’t join the euro unless you keep to those rules for an appreciable amount of time first. A new hospital makes much less of a bulge in the deficit and debt figures if it’s paid for on the tick. (Never mind that the public will pay through the nose and over the odds for it every year for 40 years.) The likeliest reason for the Tories’ and Labour’s love for ruinously expensive PFI deals is that both were trying to keep the UK within the euro’s rules and therefore primed for entry. That's not to say that governments aren't anyway keen on hiding debt - but the conditions for euro entry give them an extra reason to do so.

After ruling out euro entry in 2003, the UK continued to abide by the rules. Every British government has been a teacher’s pet for EU compliance, even when breaking the rules doesn’t attract a fine*. So, money for “schools’n’hospitals” was and is wasted on usurious mortgages – and on rip-off service charges for basic buildings maintenance – that massage UK plc’s books for the benefit of the European Commission and its rules for the euro.

From "Some ways in which the EU afflicts the NHS": viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1009334

* “The Maastricht Treaty’s Excessive Deficit Procedure sets deficit and debt reference levels of 3 per cent and 60 per cent respectively for all EU countries. The UK’s compliance is assessed on a financial year basis… These data were reported to the European Commission at the end of March 2011.” From the website of the Office for National Statistics

German investors including I.G Farben based ventures are standing in line to take over entire hospitals and run them in an economic manner.
Hopefully Dr. Menken who acquired himself quite a reputation performing in vivo experiments on foreign persons attending a holiday camp in Germany without exceeding his annual budget stays home.

http://investmentwatchblog.com/private- ... hospitals/

The scale and level of incompetence exhibited by civil servants, government ministers and IT consultants is indeed breath-taking.


At every turn, senior government ministers were told this NHS computerisation is/was, a 'pie in the sky' vainglorious impossibility. Post nu scum's 2005 election victory, Hewitt was installed as the new Health Secretary, it was then that the plug should have been pulled on the NHS records digitisation attempt - a perfect opportunity to 'wipe the slate clean'.

But then, that would have necessitated a modicum of individual initiative and a realistic rational approach - none of which were possessed by Patricia Hewitt, which is why I think she was given the post - and highlights just how much the Nu scummers really love the NHS.

So onwards ploughed the NHS computerisation with Hewitt 'the gormless' at the helm therefore, some of this fiasco can be of little surprise - one of Bliar's babes - even to put her in charge of overseeing the regular and proficient cleaning of one hospital toilet - it would be beyond her capabilities.

Still, she got smoking banned 2007 - so wiki says and now she is on a nice little earner - which just goes to show, incompetence, gross mismanagement and for boundless stupidity [Prescott - don't forget Johnny] it's hard to surpass those nu scum years and all of them are rewarded for their laxity - it ain't what you know [most definitely] it's all about the contacts you make when you're a minister! - If that ain't corruption and mutual interest in Hewitts case - then what is?

Yes, so the Labour government makes mistakes, so what?

It's a new canvass isn't it?

One shudders to think! What new scams and incompetencies are on the boil?


There is one, a very obvious one..................... Huhne's green energy initiatives, they have been tried before, in Spain and Germany - both nations are busily reneging on such idiocy, cutting back on solar subsidies, binning plans for wind farms and in the German's case, building coal fired power stations, Australia have tried the government subsidy route, to enable householders to insulate homes etc - look at how successful it was.
Germany and Spain -these countries are in full retreat from the green energy route - why then, as Huhne I am sure knows full well, with the science of AGW blasted and totally effaced, why are we on the road to national economic suicide - via his bonkers enabling of Milipeed's lunatic climate ACT.

How's that for sheer boneheaded dogma? Hewitt doesn't come close.

PFI was the subject on Jeremy Vine this lunchtime. Some call-in punter mentioned the possibility of bungs. He was hastily shut up, and nobody else mentioned at all what might seem at least worth checking. That when there is a big pile of taxpayer's money up for grabs, the processes involved are far from transparent. It seems all too easy to circumvent any open competitive system of tendering/bidding. It seems so difficult for any private firm save the usual suspects to even get to the point of being allowed to compete. There are gatekeepers, in the council, on the NHS boards, in government, who may be controlling the whole thing. I think it should be assumed that the process is corrupt unless it can be shown otherwise. And Jeremy Vine runs in fear (of what?) if somebody even mentions the possibility, when vast sums are already known to have been wasted, or transferred seamlessly to the bottom line of some bunch of shysters.

I believe in the private sector, I believe enterprise trumps central planning, but this is just giving private firms access to free money. Do not believe that it happens by chance, or by neglect, or by incompetence. It doe not.

Back in 97 I lost my senior managerial job with a large manufacturer after a reorg. I happened to be on secondment in the Middle East and got out-maneuverer by those who saw me as a threat. Shlt happens so I turned my skills to IT, having done it whilst at University back in the days. So at age 40 or so I started modestly feeling my way as a techie whilst looking at the managerial side of IT. As I had bills to pay and 4 children to feed and educate I saw the quickest way to advance and earn a decent crust was via the technical route. This was quite easy for me as frankly all IT techies get in the way of education and training is product training which does not equip them to tackle some of the issues faced in the running of a large IT site. My engineering training has been of great benefit to me although some of the managers I have worked for along the way hated my logical and systematic approach to the job.

What has all this got to do with the above? Well everything. Of all the techies I have met only about 10% do about 90% of the work. All the rest follow mindless admistrative procedures that are often written by nerds that have never done the real work. Most of the management I have had contact with are either graduates working their way through the organisation and therefore clueless or sales people whose job it is to move iron (silicon) or sell a service at a loss and hope to make up the profit by grossly overcharging for all the extras (which is 90% of any IT project and why they go out of control every time)

The best in IT will if they get a break get a job with a bank or other financial institution. Here you get to work with a mixture of cutting edge and legacy technology and usually, but not always it’s a challenge to deliver. This is where I'm at as a techie. My organisation has very rapidly cut down on much of its waste in its frontline IT, cutting whole projects that delivered nothing, some that had incredibly been going 5 or more years.

It has always been obvious to us that the grand scheme as envisioned by the Government would not work. There are many things we would like to do in our organisation but they don't work. We are in the process of dismantling one of our core services and breaking it back down into its constituent parts. The grandiose scheme to centralise our core trading services turned out to be a nightmare to administer and impossible to improve.

So if we can't do it when everyone is focused and under the cosh to deliver, it will never happen in the public service, ever. This is the message that needs to be imbedded in our politians heads.

And whilst we all gnash our teeth at these IT “vanity projects”, our coalition government is creating a number of its own.

Wind turbines, solar power and HS2 are but 3 that I can think of. So we should really forget what Labour has done, and direct our ire at the current government, to ensure that they do not make the same mistake all over again.

But being Politians they all forget to identify the real need when setting out on capital projects and always gravitate to grandiose schemes wasting billions along the way.

But to cancel the above would require leaving the EU for each of these is part of being in the EU. And perhaps here is where labour got it completely wrong in their attempt to have their own grand schemes that were outside the secret EU directives.

All the stupid things, wind, solar, PFI, HS2, are explained by my pile of money theory. I don't know another explanation which comes near. Corruption, first suspect, every time.

Re: Reason - Give me a Reason (Pedantry warning!)

Having recently returned from Svalbard I can tell you it isn't a peninsula it's an archipelago of 84 or so named islands.

Having got that off my chest - the idea that some "British Artist" has got apparently £500K of public money to "perform" up there sickens me to the pit of my stomach.

Who the f*ck handed over this money? OK, OK - the Arts Council "2012 Cultural Olympiad" they say... They're obviously devoid of accountability and conscience. I daresay I'm not alone in being outraged / exasperated by this -but - this must stop.

I'd bet there'll be some wibbling about warbal gloming and our effect on the environment but... one of the REAL effects I witnessed on my recent 4 week scientific expedition from Svalbard is the remorseless rise in Mercury in the Polar environment (to the point where tertiary predators are definitely deemed way too poisonous for us to eat - Minamata territory) due to curly lightbulbs being sent to "green" rubbish incinerators - a subject that Greenpiece of sh1ts won't talk about...... The law of unintended consequences prevails....

edit:
I would like to substitute slaughtering "them" with tying them to a post on one of the outlying islands of the archipelago smothered with rotting seal blubber in an attempt to attract some hungry polar bears that have survived global warming.

btw Svalbard is to Norway as the Canary Islands are to Spain with a few peculiar twists - fwiw....

I remember going to an IT recruitment evening around about 2003-2004 for Accenture (if I remember correctly) which I am sure was to recruit people for the NHS project. It had been heavily advertised in the mainstream press - the Metro if I recall correctly - so it was going to attract people without the necessary skills or experience. I remember walking out because they just didn't seem to know what they wanted. I remember that they seemed to have misprinted the salaries in the advert, offering more for unskilled staff than skilled ones.

It was bizarre. I'm not surprised it failed really.

"I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that, at a time when thousands of people are losing their jobs and when the country is on the brink of bankruptcy, we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast."

Not sure why he or his constituents would find it astonishing. The public sector will still be trying to spend like this when half of England is living in tents and eating dog food.

(From the NHS/PFI post) In terms of public finance, the system has overdosed on our money and, as long as it is given more, it will continue its binge spending.

The system overdosed long ago and ran out - for a very long time now they have been borrowing (on your behalf) to keep the scam afloat.

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock