The Government has been contacted by 22 acute hospital trusts who claim they are struggling to stay afloat because of the weight of their PFI deals, the Daily Telegraph reported.
PFI-built hospitals could be left half empty while trusts still have to pay millions every year in interest payments, the Telegraph said.
David Stout, deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the umbrella body for health trusts, said: “There is a real danger that we will be paying for hospitals that are not being fully used.”
The contracts are due to run for decades and are difficult to renegotiate, while the NHS’s budget has stopped growing and managers are under orders to make £20billion of efficiency savings by 2015.
“These deals were devised at a time when funding coming into the NHS was growing and income was stable. The issue now is that the NHS is undergoing fundamental change and income for hospitals to cover the costs of PFI will become less stable, primarily because the NHS faces an unprecedented financial challenge,” Stout said.
The total PFI commitment of the hospitals in question is estimated at £5.5billion, after the financial crisis raised borrowing costs.
But John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund, told The Guardian that PFI is not the only problem. “To simply blame PFI, which is certainly how it came across to me, is simply misleading as best.”
Appleby explained to the BBC: “What the Department of Health is doing is to put pressure on hospitals to be more productive while funding is frozen and in cash terms cut.
“For those hospitals with PFI they’ve got fixed costs but prices they are able to charge are going down in real terms. That’s where the pressure comes from.”
Lord Crisp, the former chief executive of the NHS when many of the PFI deals were agreed, told the BBC that PFI payments are currently less that 1% of annual NHS turnover of more than £100bn.
The Department of Health is working with their chief executives to find ways to make the deals more affordable, with plans due later this year.
Options include the Treasury making one-off payments or trying to renegotiate contracts. Struggling trusts could also be merged with more successful ones, with the older facilities forced to close.
