6 Nov 2025
The threat of new private finance in our NHS
In their 10 Year Plan for Health, this government stated that they would consider the introduction of new private finance into the NHS. They outlined a possible plan to use Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to build Neighbourhood Health Centres.
A decision will be made on this plan at the Autumn Budget, which will be delivered on the 25th November.
We’re making sure the government knows that private finance is not welcome in our NHS.
The disastrous legacy of private finance
Private finance was initially introduced into the NHS in the form of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the early 1990s. Through PFI deals, the NHS was able to build and maintain hospitals, in return for a series of annual payments. These payments last for the duration of the PFI contract, which is typically about 25-30 years.
At the time, PFI may have felt extremely appealing: the government was able to build new healthcare infrastructure while keeping the debt off the national balance sheet. But it soon became clear that the cost of this short term political gain was huge. Astronomical annual PFI repayments have eaten into the budget of NHS trusts, and siphoned money away from patient care:
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Under PFI, we paid £80 billion for just £13 billion of actual investment.
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In the last 5 years alone, NHS trusts have spent more than £1.8 billion on PFI interest payments. This would have paid for the starting salaries of 50,044 new doctors.
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Some hospitals are spending more on repaying PFI debts than they are on medicines for their patients.
Repackaging PFI
In the 10 Year Plan for Health, the government promised to learn from the mistakes of PFI.
But this promise has already been made, time and time again. PFI has been re-packaged as PF2, LIFT, the Scottish NPD model and now as the Welsh Mutual Investment Model (MIM). It is possible that the government will use the MIM model for building Neighbourhood Health Centres.
Despite the different names, each version of private finance is based on the same premise: the taxpayer must pay back huge amounts of money over a long period of time, in a deal which ultimately costs us significantly more for the same infrastructure.
You can read more about these different versions of private finance - and their impact on the NHS - in our briefing here:
Our petition hand-in
Over 16,000 of you have already signed our petition to keep new PFI out of Neighbourhood Health Centres.
We’re taking that petition directly to the Treasury at our hand-in event on the 18th November. We’ll hear from speakers about the importance of keeping private finance out of our NHS, and make sure our message is heard loud and clear as we hand in the petition.
We need you to join us as we make our voices heard to the Treasury.
