Whipps Cross hospital workers on a previous protest (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
Whipps Cross and Barts NHS crisis: Cancel all PFI!
Nancy Taaffe, Waltham Forest Socialist Party and TUSC candidate for Walthamstow
Under successive Labour and Tory governments PFI contracts signed throughout the UK totalled £68 billion. This committed the British taxpayer to future spending of £215 billion. Waltham Forest and our local hospital, Whipps Cross, is now mired in a cycle of debt that threatens the very existence of Whipps.
Whipps Cross is being undermined and starved of resources from all angles. It was reported at the last Health Overview Scrutiny Committee of Waltham Forest council that for every £8 spent in the Barts health trust, £1 is spent servicing the PFI debt.
The trust has a £90 million deficit and £50 million owing in debt repayment. These figures were described by the committee as a “ticking time bomb”.
Labour MPs in the constituencies that the trust covers are joining forces to say that Barts is now ‘too big’ and must be broken up.
The trust was formed under a Labour government and in the face of opposition from health unions and us in the Socialist Party. Now they are calling for it to be broken up.
We want to know what this means. Does it mean the scaling back of Whipps Cross hospital into a specialised treatment centre and signal the end of a community hospital? We are demanding that they tell us now.
Whipps Cross hospital workers (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
The Health Scrutiny Committee kept reiterating the need for cheap housing and the inability of junior doctors and nursing staff to get local housing.
We argued that the nurses’ home at Whipps should never have been closed and should be refurbished and brought up to standard to make it habitable. This would be one way to attract nurses to train at our hospital.
We suspect that their talk of providing ‘social housing’ means the land within the hospital grounds will be sold off to yet another multi-million asset housing association who will sell and rent flats back to struggling health workers at inflated rents.
We also pointed out that the low staffing levels and low morale covered in the CQC report was a consequence of redundancies and downbandings in 2013 and we think that further cuts will exacerbate the situation.
At the Health Scrutiny Committee we were told that the cuts package won’t be revealed until June – one month after the general election. The Socialist party thinks the public have a right to know the full scale of the cuts and where they will fall, this side of the election.
We are standing two parliamentary candidates for TUSC in Waltham Forest on the demand to unshackle our hospital, and all the others, from PFI repayment.
