Lewisham Campaigner: December 2012

Friday, 28 December 2012

Charactor Country Cottages with Thatch roofs and wood burners to let

If you are looking to escape to the Countryside then these charming grade 2 listed Thatch Cottages in Oxfordshire by the Cotswolds are perfect.
From just £230 for a weekend and from £300 per week, you can truly live the rual dream.
Each 400 year old cottage has wood burners, beams, low ceilings , cottage garden and heaps of charactor ideal for Couple or rent 2 cottages next door to each other.
Full details on www.housemartins.net then click holiday lettings tab at top of page.

Granada Lecrin Valley Spain Charactor Mountain House for holiday lets

Wanting to get away from it all? fancy the choice of Mountains or the beach? or just mountain walks with the off tour to Granada or other stunning Spanish Cities, then this house to let with Housemartins would be perfect, Sleeping from 2-9 it offers great value at £300 per week and is just outside Granada in Niguelas a stunning tradittional village on a cliff edge, with stunning mountain views, whilst being in a great location to tour.
This Charactor house can be accessed via Granada or Malaga Airports, and you can live in village without a car, as transport is good via local bus service. full details on www.housemartins.net then click on holiday lettings tab at top of page.

Thursday, 27 December 2012

NHS The year the public discovered the Truth about Hospital closures and privatisation

We are grinding towards the end of a momentous year, which for millions will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
Yes, there was Danny Boyle's celebration of the NHS before the sunshine and gold of the Olympics, but 2012 was also the year that Andrew Lansley's reactionary Health and Social Care Bill was passed into law on the basis of Lib Dem votes.
Coupled with the brutal imposition of £20 billion in cuts by 2014, and the continued haemorrhage of NHS cash to the private sector through the private finance initiative (PFI) - soon to be accelerated with its barely distinguishable offspring PF2 - the HSC Act is set to sweep away the NHS as we know it from April.
The pattern is clear - all of the cuts fall on public-sector providers, while all the expansion and opportunities are being offered to the private sector.
Grasping companies like Serco, Richard Branson's Virgin Health, Care UK and others are cashing in as an ever wider range of services are opened up for private profit, while those that don't offer profits are run down, reconfigured and closed.
And behind every reconfiguration, reprofiling and tendering exercise is a consultancy firm charging a fortune for duff advice, dodgy figures, phoney theories and failed policies, snapping up fat profits from the crisis.
Like the cockroaches that are thought to be the most likely survivors of a nuclear holocaust, the lowest forms of life - management consultants who borrow your watch to tell you the time and charge you £3,000 - seem to be the main beneficiaries of the Tory-created crisis in the NHS.
They will be cashing in soon on more and more "commissioning support services" set up to advise GPs on the new clinical commissioning groups on how to spend the budgets they will now be made to feel responsible for, even though it's plain that GPs will have little real discretion or control.
GPs have been press-ganged into these bodies despite a majority of GPs consistently opposing Lansley's Bill.
In the run-up to the launch of the clinical commissioning groups they are now bombarded with bureaucratic rules and paperwork, and by deliberately confusing policy guidance from the NHS Commissioning Board - while the organisations that should have led the fight to stop the Bill stand by paralysed, like rabbits in car headlights.
Behind all this apparatus of a new market being expensively wheeled into place comes another parasitic group - the lawyers, picking up fat fees from all sides at every stage.
One thing they seem agreed upon is that little should be done to challenge the Act - or even to encourage GPs and clinical commissioning groups to exploit the few loopholes that have been left in the guidance.
For example clinical commissioning groups should be taking full advantage of the NHS Commissioning Board guidance that they are not obliged to operate the "any qualified provider" policy - they should be lining up four-square against a policy that would deprive GPs of any actual control, and which is designed to impose maximum fragmentation and to let a host of new and untested providers into the new healthcare "market."
Instead, lawyers working for campaign group 38 Degrees have drafted up weak-kneed general statements which are so vague they offer no real challenge to the NHS Commissioning Board.
Rather than test the government's willingness to use competition law and the NHS Commissioning Board's willingness to intervene in local clinical commissioning group decisions, this approach dodges all conflict - just when we need a real fight.
In the background, we are always told, are European competition laws - which were of course hatched up and backed to the hilt by British governments.
It's like an old war movie in which gallant allied troops are warned "resistance is futile."
But is it? How will we know unless somebody tests it out, has a go, makes a fight of it?
How will this happen if the BMA and the royal colleges which are supposed to uphold ethical values don't encourage doctors to stand up and fight, or even to assert any real control as commissioners of services?
And how likely is this to happen when the TUC health unions are taking such an ambiguous position, occasionally talking a good fight but challenging so little on the ground?
The unions tend to take their lead from the Labour Party, which is sitting on a hefty lead in opinion polls - and doing as little as possible to draw attention to the fact that Lansley's Bill, and most of the current problems in the NHS, trace back to Tony Blair's disastrous experiments in marketising the NHS.
Ed Balls and Andy Burnham still doggedly defend PFI and their stupidity in office in rubber-stamping unaffordable deals which are now dragging trusts like South London Healthcare and Peterborough into massive, unpayable debt.
South London has gone bust, and Peterborough ran out of money to pay bills on November 30.
Labour has nothing to say on how these and other crises that they created must now be resolved.
New Labour ministers also set up the so-called Co-operation and Competition Panel, which is now used to prise open local NHS contracts to let the private sector pick off the bits it wants - and leave the rest.
It was Labour which commissioned the 2009 McKinsey proposals on cost-cutting, the bogus assumptions and evidence-free policies which are now the basic management bible for cuts up and down the NHS.
Labour lined up the Circle takeover of Hinchingbrooke Hospital. And Labour first began the carve-up of community health services and coined the term "any willing provider," welcoming in profiteering private companies to run treatment centres, GP surgeries and a host of other contracts.
Of course the Tories are going much further, faster and doing far more lasting damage.
They are cutting not only acute hospitals but also mental health services. The mental health budget is now falling for the first time in 10 years.
Community mental health is cut, broken up and privatised. Disability benefit cuts clobber the mentally ill.
Social care is slashed to ribbons, along with crisis services and home support, while employment and day centres for mental health sufferers have also been slashed back.
But where is the co-ordinated Labour campaign to stop the cuts and keep private hands off our NHS?
Why won't they declare they will support all of the tens of thousands of local people protesting against cuts and closures, rejecting the feeble pretence that threatened A&E services will be replaced by community health care for which there is no money, plan or political commitment?
The stakes are growing ever higher. In south-east London the trust special administrator, using dictatorial powers drawn up by Labour, is trying to prop up the disastrous PFI contracts for two hospitals in Woolwich and Orpington by a smash-and-grab raid on neighbouring Lewisham Hospital.
Upwards of 30,000 emergencies and seriously ill patients a year in one of the most deprived English boroughs would be unable to access treatment locally at Lewisham Hospital, and face long and arduous journeys for care in other hospitals - which are already full to the rafters.
Some 4,000 women in labour each year would have to trek out to surrounding hospitals with the closure of Lewisham's maternity unit.
Children's services are also to be cut. Hundreds of jobs would go, upwards of 400 hospital beds, and 60 per cent of the Lewisham hospital site and most of Queen Mary's, Sidcup, would be flogged off.
In north-west London, health chiefs want to axe 28 per cent of beds by 2016, close four A&E units and cut 5,600 jobs, most of them clinical staff.
In north-east London King George's Hospital faces dismemberment in a desperate bid to bail out the bankrupt PFI-funded Queen's Hospital in Romford.
Other A&E units and emergency services are under threat with reconfigurations threatened across England, from the south coast to Bolton, Yorkshire and beyond.
The reconfigurations, like that in south-east London, are all based on spurious claims, figures and assumptions.
But from next April the HSC Act will mean that when gaps appear and services are thrown into crisis there is no strategic planning body able to intervene.
Our NHS has effectively been stolen - but we must still fight to minimise the damage, oppose the privatisation, keep services intact and defend those GPs who take a stand and the brave doctors, consultants and health workers who have challenged the cutbacks at Lewisham Hospital.
We must find every way to delay, obstruct and frustrate those implementing the new system, deter the private profiteers, encourage those who stand for NHS values and demand Labour spell out plans to roll back the Tory counter-reforms.
We've got three months before the Act kicks in, and immediate battles against cuts. Let's make sure January campaigning gets off to a flier and not a minute is wasted.
All together now, in the panto spirit - Jeremy Hunt thinks he's going to flog off your NHS. Oh no he isnt.

Sign the People before Profit Petition, go to the petitution opposing PFI, or sign direct via People before Profit website then forward the link to every one on your email list.
We need 100.000 people to sign petition to ban PFI.

PFI.( Private finance Initiative) One huge reason never to vote Labour again.

The ski resort of Chamonix, dramatically overlooked by Mont Blanc, is not quite the most expensive in the Alps – but it keeps its end up. The flashiest restaurant, La Cabane, charges £19 for a starter and £33 for a main course. The best room in the top hotel, the Relais & Chateaux Albert the First, costs £420 a night.

All this week, The Daily Telegraph has been exposing a different kind of spending – the amazing sums taken from the taxpayer under the Private Finance Initiative. And all this week, eating in that restaurant and living in that hotel room, has been one of the principal beneficiaries.

His name is David Metter. He is 58 years old. You have almost certainly never heard of him – he keeps an extremely low profile – but he has made his fortune, conservatively estimated at £60 million, out of you.

Mr Metter is the king of the PFIs, the biggest single player in the market. He personally controls almost three-quarters of a company called Innisfree. He employs just 14 people – but he owns or co-owns 28 NHS hospitals, 269 schools, the Whitehall HQ of the Ministry of Defence, a Scottish motorway and a Welsh jail.

Under the PFI, Innisfree and other private investors build and operate such facilities, then effectively rent them to the state – at a substantial premium. The Daily Telegraph disclosed this week that for an NHS hospital in Bromley which cost £118 million to build, taxpayers will end up paying 10 times as much – £1.2 billion – to the PFI owners.

Innisfree is one of those owners – and at Bromley alone, according to the National Audit Office, it is making a return from taxpayers of 71 per cent. The Daily Telegraph did not set out to target Innisfree. But in the most controversial PFI schemes found by this newspaper, it was striking how often the company turned up.
It owns four-fifths of the PFI school in Clacton which has now closed – but for which taxpayers must still pay it £1.4 million a year, Innisfree’s share of the deal, until 2035. It owns the Birmingham school where parents couldn’t start an after-hours club to keep their kids off the streets – because Innisfree charged £70 per hour for a caretaker. It had a 50 per cent stake in the calamitous Defence Animal Centre deal, where each dog kennel cost more per night than a five-star hotel room (though admittedly not as much as Mr Metter’s suite in Chamonix.)
Innisfree has the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, where it effectively locked taxpayers into a 60-year contract. And it has a quarter of the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital – where Innisfree and its partners refinanced their debt, lengthening the NHS’s repayment term from 34 to 39 years, but raising their own rate of return from 16 to 60 per cent. Only a small portion of the refinancing gain was shared with the taxpayer.
Of course, the prices we pay to PFI companies include interest, inflation, and often support services, such as maintenance – but they also include, numerous independent academics have warned, “significant excess returns” for the companies and “far above market” financing costs for the taxpayer. Even repayments on a normal mortgage, of the kind you or I could get, work out at perhaps just three times a property’s capital value.
Innisfree insists that it risks its own money, or that of its investors, in deals which can go wrong. But actually, it invests only tiny amounts. The hospitals it owns or co-owns have a total capital value of £4.8 billion; Innisfree’s share of them is worth about £2.2 billion. By its own account, the actual amount of money it has put into those hospitals is £376 million, or an average of £13 million per hospital. The rest is borrowed.
And from the company’s latest accounts it does not, to be blunt, look too great a risk. Last year, Innisfree made 53 per cent profit on its turnover. A highly successful FTSE company, such as Tesco, reckons to make 6 per cent.
Mr Metter collected pay and dividends of £8.6 million last year, and can afford an enviable lifestyle. He has a £5 million villa in London’s chi-chi Little Venice. Skiing in Chamonix’s expensive mountains is an annual treat for the “PPP Forum”, his lobbying group – its brochure jokes about “high-level networking”. Ninety people, the cream of the PFI business, went last year, most staying at the Albert the First or the second-best hotel in town.
All credit, some may say, to Mr Metter for spotting a wholly legal and legitimate business opportunity, one which has lifted him from middle-ranking property manager to multi-millionaire. But public spending is falling and the storm clouds are gathering – interestingly, from the Right.
Edward Leigh, the Thatcherite Tory who until last year chaired the Commons’ public accounts committee, called the Norwich hospital deal “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. Another Tory MP, Jesse Norman, now says Innisfree has “made more money for less work than any other group of people I can think of”.
Mr Norman leads a cross-party campaign asking PFI contractors to give back some of their profits, or bend their inflexible contracts to the austerity era. Mr Metter did not respond to our questions asking whether he would consider this. Nor did he answer whether he pays UK tax.
Mr Metter may, I suppose, reckon that he has legally binding agreements and no great reason to worry about being unpopular. But then, so did RBS’s Sir Fred Goodwin.

Showing 1-25 of 154 comments

wattys123
01/29/2011 07:13 AM

This situation is the fault of the last government not Mr Matter - and lets face it if he can rip the taxpayer off like he has, he is unlikely to worry about the morality of paying his tax locally.
fagin1
01/29/2011 07:10 AM

What a racket. Take a close look at the odorous delivery, exclusivity (for the protection of shareholders’ profit), and financial terms of the RAF’s tanker / transport (FSTA) PFI contract. How on earth could anyone in MoD even remotely consider this represents good value for money. Annual base-line costs, (which will be routinely and substantially exceeded), are around £485m per year and will continue for 27 years even if during that period Britain no longer requires that capability!
Even though the NAO auditors were poorly briefed, their report reveals that the ‘service’ will be delivered at in excess of ten times the aircraft’s realistic hourly operating cost and that the service falls short of the originally planned capabilities, (believe me, I know).
Outrageous, obscene, unadulterated greed, exploitation of taxpayers.
It is still cheaper to cancel the deal, buy the aircraft outright at the real market price, with legitimate third party asset funding if required and, with good management, deliver far better for much, much less!
Genuine commercial opportunities are fair game but there must come a point, particularly in regard to public services, where we exercise moral judgement; I care for my Country and this is certainly not in our collective interests. It’s time we had the ability to hold people to account for such incompetence.
Let’s be clear; the fault is entirely attributable to the Blair/Brown government.
lastfreeman
01/28/2011 05:08 PM

We need to put the crime of Economic Treason on the statute book. A compulsory minimum jail term of 24 years with no hope of early release. Bankers who ruin their banks through greed, hedgies that destroy British firms & thousands of jobs, PFI bosses who fleece taxpayers, British bankers betting against the pound, all qualify for economic treason by my reckoning.
attheheart
01/28/2011 04:33 PM

I don't think you have really got to the bottom of this. Politicians wanted things built. They got what they wanted. The culprits, if that is what you are looking for, is not the government of the day, the contractors or the civil servants. It is the 'experts'. Every single PFI project has a business case that demonstrated it is value for money. That business case would be prepared by the experts and accepted by their clients. So your paper is now quite rightly saying that all of those experts produced material that was wrong.
Now you start to get warm. Who advised on the processes needed to deliver PFI? Who was seconded into the Treasury to head up the delivery PFI? Who negotiated these flawed commercial deals? Who made millions and millions of pounds from the advisory work?
There are two sets of culprits: the financial and legal advisers.
I was involved in many many PFIs. One stood out. A school that cost £12M to build. The Council's external legal costs to negotiate the PFI contract, based on a standardised contract, was £1M.
PFI for the advisers has been the golden goose. The government asked the advisers how to do PFI. Their advice established an industry.
When you think about asking the private sector for 'money back', don't forget those now silent advisers who said this was all great value for money.
But, it goes deeper. Inside the process were a number of bodies. The main one of which was Partnerships UK. It is they who established and promoted PFI. They developed the guidance and heavily promoted it to ensure it was the only game in town. And where did Partnerships UK recruit from? The advisers.
You might say 'there is no point crying over spilt milk!"
But, I leave you with this. And to be honest this is where your journalism has failed to draw informed conclusions. Where are the main proponents of PFI now? These people who have cost the country billions through their poor advice. Well the truth is they remain at the heart of government. They continue to advise and their advice is followed.
Who ran Partnerships UK? What are they doing now? Who headed up PFI in the NHS? What are they doing now? Who were the leading advisers in the PFI market? How much consultancy do they currently deliver to the public sector?
Always remember this, every PFI investment was supported by very expensive expert opinion that value for money was being achieved.
aeronut
01/29/2011 08:24 AM

Perhaps the DT could dig deeper and produce some names. It sounds like the Poulson corruption case of some years' ago!
paitonboy
01/28/2011 08:27 PM

Excellent post. All PFIs had to be supported by a business model which had to be approved. These highly-paid charlatans should be sued for professional negligence.
droglite
01/28/2011 01:50 PM

Innisfree is one of those owners – and at Bromley alone, ..according to the National Audit Office, it is making a return from taxpayers of 71 per cent. ...
Obscene!!
Simple solution Mr Cameron. Nationalise them.
tartanrock
01/28/2011 12:37 PM

As others have suggested those PFI contracts which produce an excessive profit for the contractor should be renegotiated. Andrew reports that 'a crossparty campaign is asking PFI contractors to give back some of their profits'. But Parliament is supreme. It can make or unake any law. It is not bound by its predecessors. We have a financial crisis in which ordinary are having to sacrifice income and prospects. The Govt should therefore ask Parliament to pass legislation (a) requiring all PFI contracts to scrutinised and if necessary renegotiaed and (b) providing that, if negotiations are unsuccessful, the state will acquire the assets at a reasonable price, payable in instalments over ten years. In other words, don't ask 'em, tell 'em.
colmcostello
01/28/2011 11:06 AM

I can remember when John Major introduced PFI to this country on a limited scale, and John Prescott had a right go at the idea on breakfast with Frost at the time.
Pity he didn't practice what he preached
malawbrook
01/28/2011 08:06 AM

What I really don't understand is how these PFI projects got signed off in the first place. Who, in for instance, the Department of Health thought that these were good deals? I know for a fact that my local hospital paid a management consultant £800,000 for one year's work, working one day a week. It is difficult to imagine the person in the D of H saying "Oh! That seems to be a good price. We'll go with that". One of the medical consultants in the hospital was sacked for telling his colleagues about this.
loucipher
01/28/2011 08:23 AM

It gets worse mate.
The last government privatised the NHS supply chain by giving the contract to DHL.
Yes - DHL the German owned haulage firm!!
UK suppliers had to submit commercially sensitive information on products and prices before being “allowed” to supply the Health service via this new privatised DHL-NHS Supply chain.
So, now the wonderful German owned DHL thinks it a great idea to cut out the UK suppliers altogether and source generic own branded product from the Tiger economy. (Using all the commercial information demanded in the first place).
Naturally, the healthcare industry is concerned. And so should we, because Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are one of the key industries that fund our economy.
If the public sector budget for our healthcare is sent directly overseas to foreign companies then many of the UK ones will go to the wall.
Another example of incompetent and unaccountable public sector management.
saffy
01/28/2011 07:54 AM

Tony to Gordon: "We must build lots of lovely new hospitals and schools so that we can improve the health of the nation and improve education, education, education. There's loads of money cos those nasty tories stupidly left some behind".
Gordon to Tony: No, no Tony, you don't understand. The reason to build hospitals and schools is so that we can introduce targets for spreading MRSA in the former and to produce ill educated Labour voting clones in the latter. That way we can kill off those who have lost their faith in socialism and make lots of shiny new socialists. Anyway there is no money left cos I've spent it all on other social engineering schemes."
Tony to Gordon: "But Gordon you can't have spent ALL the money. Just look at how much we have been fleecing from the people with our stealth taxes".
Gordon to Tony: "I am sorry to mention it Tony but you keep starting wars and they do cost quite a bit."
Tony to Gordon: "But I like starting wars it makes me look good and it gives me something to play with while I leave my marxist friends looking after all the boring bits like the police and justice and stuff like that".
Gordon to Tony: "Well ok but stick to Iraq while you think up some more lies before you go poking around in Afghanistan. Anyway I think I've found a way to finance the hospitals and schools. I won't bore you with the finer points as I know that just makes you switch off. Suffice to say it is a really bad deal for the taxpayer and it will cost about 10X what it should".
Tony to Gordon: " Won't that make us lose voters?"
Gordon to Tony: "Don't be silly Tony. We will keep the figures off balance sheet and by the time anyone finds out you and I will be long gone. You can make millions out of speeches full of verb-less waffle and I can write a book explaining how I saved the world"
Tony to Gordon: " Oooooh Gordon you are wonderful".
loucipher
01/28/2011 07:38 AM

As a landlord I am prevented by law from charging excessive fees for repairs and services to my property. Indeed my tenants have the right to seek alternative quotes and also to refuse payment for any work carried out and invoiced prior to consultation and agreement.
The PFI programme has ensured many public construction projects have been carried swiftly and to a high standard. However, we should challenge any excessive maintenance costs being levied in the courts if necessary.
avataruk
01/28/2011 07:45 AM

The courts will only look at the Contracts as signed!
loucipher
01/28/2011 08:09 AM

Just because a contract is signed does not mean all aspects and clauses are legally bound and sound.
The unfair terms of contract act 1977 and the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 may well provide plenty of material to bring about change via judicial review.
There is legislation preventing landlords from exploiting and inflating service and maintenance repair costs.
This should be pursued. The fact it has not yet is probably more to do with public sector incompetence and apathy than a lack of legitimacy.
paitonboy
01/28/2011 10:19 AM

Unfair Contract Terms 1977 only applies to consumer contracts, not PFIs.
Forget it.
- Recommend
- Report
lastfreeman
01/28/2011 05:14 PM

Then let Parliament extend the Unfair Contract Act 1977 to cover PFI.
paitonboy
01/28/2011 08:32 PM

You cannot retroactively impose a new law on existing legally-binding contracts that were freely negotiated by equal parties. That's what African despots and dictatorships do. If the UK went down that route, no business contracts would ever be honoured again and commercial life would cease to function. It's a non-starter.
rsmithscotland
01/28/2011 07:30 AM

Excellent article. The greed and profiteering from PFI needs exposed.
Those of you down in England may be unaware, as it is rarely reported (or mentioned by Labour in Westminster), but up in the Scottish parliament, Labour are regularly berating the SNP Scottish Government for NOT starting even more of these PFI schemes.
On several occasions the Labour leader in Scotland Iain Gray, has lambasted the SNP because they (the SNP) refuse to use PFI. Labour can still not see what the problem is with PFI, and the massive debt burden it has created.
Sadly, even after losing control of the Scottish Parliament, AND Westminster, it seems Labour really have learnt nothing.
see ;
http://www.newsnetscotland.com...
http://www.snp.org/node/16382
and http://www.snp.org/node/17013
avataruk
01/28/2011 07:59 AM

If we want to avoid such excessive costs again we need to take an objective view as to the causes of such problems and avoid subjectivity, emotion, and ideology - any assessment of past and existing contracts has to be largely based on the contracts "as signed" and the records of the contract's administration as available.
If we haven't the finance for necessary, even critically needed, infrastructure and public services needs, can we afford to ignore PFI as a Contract Strategy simply because of past Labour Government Ministers' , their teams', and the senior local Client's Managers' inexperience in setting up and administering such schemes and obtaining value for money. If PFI is not wanted, what alternatives are available?
Please also understand, there is no greed and profiteering involved in obtaining entitlements due under a signed contract! To go down that subjective assessment route would set precedents and create general commercial chaos!
jm
01/28/2011 07:17 AM

Excellent Andrew, this is what journalism should be about.
Parliament should re-write these contracts. I would be quite surprised if the books of these PFI operators are clean.
paitonboy
01/28/2011 10:22 AM

You cannot "re-write" a legally binding contract except by the agreement of both parties!
- Recommend
- Report