In June 2005 the plans for a super-hospital built by PFI were scrapped. The project was to be built in the Paddington Basin area of London, and would have meant the amalgamation of three NHS Trusts: Harefield Heart Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, and the Royal Brompton Hospital, and also parts of Imperial College. An example of how enthusiastic the NHS was for the project can be seen by a St Mary’s NHS Trust publication (Mary’s Matters, issue no. 32: August, 2002).
The plans for the Paddington Basin Health Campus were first drawn up in 1997 with a projected cost of £360 million. By the time the venture was scrapped eight years later, the projected cost had already breached the £1 billion barrier. The costs of the planning phase of the Paddington scheme included:
- £7.8m in fees to 52 companies including architects, planners, public relations firms and lawyers;
- £4.8m for NHS managers seconded to the project
- £1.3m for accommodation and other project costs
- £300,000 towards legal costs
The collapse of the project was described in Parliament as a “fiasco”, by Andrew Lansley, a Conservative MP (TheyWorkForYou.com, 2005).
A part of the problem which the project had was that the original design became redundant when the Government introduced tighter regulations about privacy for NHS patients. Bob Ricketts, a senior health official, had previously questioned the purpose of expensive PFI projects in an era of patient choice (Gould and Carvell, 2005). Presumably, patient choice is expensive for PFI companies to accommodate.
Then in June 2003 new plans increased the size of the super-hospital so much that that the local council insisted on a new planning application. Other major problems which the project encountered included rapidly increasing land prices and a vociferous Save Harefield campaign by the public, which
simply didn’t want the world-famous hospital to move from its present site (Gould and Carvell, 2005).
One theory about the collapse of the plans was that civil servants wrecked it due to fear that the astronomical costs would cause adverse political fallout as the General Election approached. One of the companies involved in the plans was Pearcroft, which was coincidentally connected to a major donor to New Labour named Bruce Jarvis. Land for building was also to be sold for well above its market value (Revill, 2005).
The National Audit Office, in an examination of the cost of the project, concluded that:
- management was inadequate
- there were basic weaknesses in all the partners involved in the project such as inability to manage and a lack of human resources
- the project was too ambitious and “hugely complex”
- previous advice from the NAO about a single partner taking full responsibility for driving the scheme was not heeded
A Department of Health spokesperson declared that the lessons learned from the fiasco would not deter the government from its reliance upon PFI schemes funding public building projects so long as they were “realistic”. The same spokesperson added that the £14million cost for the aborted scheme was in accordance with the rules on the proportion of overall costs which can be spent by PFI projects in the planning phase (Gould and Carvell, 2005).
One question: wouldn’t £14million wasted on this farce have been better spent on patient care? Sometimes it seems to me that the Government squanders money on health-related projects, and then asks NHS staff to pick up the bill by changing the way we work.
