Medic Attacks Tory Claims to Have Built 18 New Hospitals as Misleading

This weekend’s edition of the I carried a report that a leading medic, Dr Susan Crossland, had said that the Tories were misleading the public by claiming that they had built 18 new hospitals. The report by Paul Gallagher, ‘Tory claim to have built 18 new hospitals ‘misleading” ran

A leading medic has accused the Government of misleading the public after it claimed 18 new hospitals had opened in the past 10 years.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) made the claim in documents released under an I Freedom of Information request, but the figure includes existing hospitals either refurbished or redeveloped.

At least 11 of the projects are redevelopments, refurbishments or changes to existing hospital sites, such as integration or relocation.

Dr Susan Crossland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said “The conflation between new hospitals and refurbishment of existing hospitals is misleading to the public.

“Whilst investment in the crumbling infrastructure of the NHS property portfolio is welcome, at the time we are seeing unprecedented demand on hospital beds we call into question whether this will ease the current pressures we see. And we call on the Government to be honest and account to the tax-paying public. Are there going to be any more beds in the system, or are we going to continue to see further reductions?”

Pressed on how many of the 18 projects could be described as “whole new hospitals” the DHSC did not respond.

NHS staff union Unison said the lack of “whole new builds” was “shocking”. It said “at least half” of the projects are a legacy of the previous Labour government, so there has been “next to nothing” under the Tories.

The revelation calls into question the Government’s ability to honour its manifesto pledge to build 40 hospitals in the next 10 years. The Tory manifesto promised the NHS “its biggest ever cash boost, with 20 hospital upgrades and 40 new hospitals.”

According to FullFact.org the Government has committed the money to upgrade six hospitals by 2025. Up to 38 other hospitals have received money to plan for building work between 2025 and 2030, but not to actually begin any work.

Mr Johnson has been criticised for refusing to say how much the promised new hospitals will cost, where they would be, or where the money involved would come from. The only detail given in the six NHS trusts that would receive £2.7bn to rebuild existing acute hospitals in England by 2025, and £100m “seed money” to 21 other English trusts to work up plans for similar projects. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that if most were new hospitals in city centres containing state-of-the-art equipment, the cost might be between £12bn and £24bn.

A DHSC spokesman said: “We’ve launched the largest hospital building programme in a generation which will deliver at least 40 new hospitals over the next decade.”

So the Tories have been caught lying again. They  haven’t built 18 new hospitals. If 11 of those they cite are just refurbishments, it means at most they’ve built just 7. And it seems most of those 18 hospitals were built by the Labour government. And the claim that they’re going to build 40 new hospitals over the next ten years is just specious promises.

The reality is that they’re going to run down the NHS while making token gestures towards building and renovation to disguise what they’re doing, read for privatisation.

Justine Greening Wants Tories to Re-Introduce Maintenance Grants – More Lies from the Tories?

The I newspaper yesterday reported that Justine Greening, the Tory education minister, wants to reintroduce maintenance grants for the poorest students in order to combat Labour’s popularity with them over the issue of student debt.

The I wrote

Ministers are preparing plans to bring back university maintenance grants. The move is part of the “broader thinking” being undertaken by the Department for Education to implement policies that will have greater appeal to younger voters.

The level of debt in which graduates are leaving university has come under mounting scrutiny in recent months. Tuition fees became a major election battleground following Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to scrap the policy which saw young voters flock to Labour in their droves.

Over the weekend, Theresa May announced plans to freeze tuition fees at £9,250 a year while the income threshold at which graduates will be expected to start paying back their loans was raised from £21,000 to £25,000.

But I understands that the DfE wants to go further and bring back maintenance grants to help the poorest students as the Education Secretary, Justine Greening, battles with the Treasury to push through the plans.

“We didn’t think it is right that the poorest students come out of the university with the most debt,” a senior DfE source said.

The source refused to rule out that the plans could be contained in the Budget next month, although separate sources said the plans were not that advanced.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, bringing back maintenance grants would cost just under £500m. the IFS published research yesterday showing that the Prime Minister’s plans to raise the repayment threshold would cost the taxpayer £2.3bn a year, and lead to 83 per cent of graduates never paying off the full amount of their loan.

The former Chancellor George Osborne announced in 2015 that maintenance grants would be scrapped in time for the start of the 2016 academic year as part of the Government’s austerity drive. The grants were kept by the devolved government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The move to abolish the funding meant students from the lowest-income households were forced to take out loans on top of their tuition fees loans to pay for living costs.

Labour has said it would bring back the grants, and the policy is gaining support from university vice-chancellors. Universities UK, which represents the majority of higher education institutions in Britain, said the return of maintenance grants would be a “welcome enhancement”.

Alistair Jarvis, UK’s chief executive, said: “Students tell us that it is cash in their pockets while studying that matters most.

“It is right to continue to examine how the current system can be improved to ensure that money isn’t a barrier for students.”

See Greening battles Treasury for maintenance grants return, in the I for Wednesday, 4th October 2017, page 4.

So an anonymous source in the Department of Education claims that Justine Greening would like to bring back maintenance grants, as Labour intends to do so, thus becoming massively popular with the young people looking at being saddled with massive debt. And other sources say the plans aren’t that advanced, and the Treasury don’t want it.

This shows that the claims is yet another lie, intended to make the Tories look more like they actually care about providing for the British public, rather than giving more money to the extremely rich.

Just as the article shows that Theresa May’s plan to cap student debt still would leave four-fifth of all students unable to pay it off.

And Mike has shown how May’s claim to freeze tuition fees actually represents an increase. And who’s going to bet that the freeze only lasts as long May decides it’s convenient. Which from the evidence of the rest of her broken promises, means that it’ll be dumped as soon as she gets back into power. Assuming that ever happens.

The Tories are lying to us again. Just like they always do. But students aren’t daft, and I doubt anyone is going to be taken it.

If you want to make sure our young people are able to go to uni to get the education they want, and which this country needs, then vote Labour so that Corbyn can do something about the monstrous level of student debt forty years of Thatcherism have inflicted on students.

Private Eye on Andrea Leadsom and the Hedge Funds Backing Brexit

This fortnight’s Private Eye also has an interesting piece on Andrea Leadsom, one of the leading Tory Brexit supporters. Leadsom has been complaining that several of the organisations warning of the dire consequences Brexit will have on the British economy are funded by the dreaded EU. The Eye points out that Leadsom herself is also funded by her brother-in-law, a hedge fund manager based in the Channel Islands, and that the hedge funds generally support Brexit in the expectation that it will help them avoid paying tax. The Eye writes

Hedging Her Bets

“I put it down to a big institutional ganging up on the poor British voter,” complained Andrea Leadsom, the leading “outer” who is said to be having a good war, referring to the way the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others point out the likely costs of leaving the EU. “What do they have in common, these organisations?” Number one – lots of EU funding.”

The energy and former Treasury minister perhaps knows more than she has previously let on about the power of financial backing to influence views and policy. Leadsom herself ahs had plenty of financial backing from the offshore hedge und run by her brother-in-law Peter de Putron, as has the EU-sceptic Open Europe thinktank, she has championed (Eyes passim ad nauseam).

What result the Guernsey-based donor hopes for is not known. But plenty of other hedgies want out so they can escape EU regulation of their funds (inexplicably confident that a British Tory government would be kinder to them). Others are just pleased it’s all getting nice and tight so they can take positions on sterling and cash in on the early exit poll information they are paying for outside the polling booths. (p. 7).

Her connection to hedge funds and their managers should be one good reason alone why no-one should take Andrea Leadsom remotely seriously. Many of the private care home chains that collapsed a few years ago were run by hedge funds, as is a private hospital in Bath. These organisations see health and social care as a lucrative investment, and their financial arrangements are so organised in order to make it appear that the firms are operating close to their margins so they can benefit from tax breaks. As a result, the care homes and hospitals they manage are often underfunded and genuinely in a precarious financial situation. Hence the appalling failures of several care homes to provide acceptable standards of care to their elderly or handicapped inmates, and their spectacular collapse.

And unfortunately, at the moment the hedge funds and the parasites in charge of them are all too right in their expectations that a British Tory government won’t tax them. The Tories have shown absolutely no interest in doing so up to now. In fact, quite the opposite. They are trying to do their best to protect London and the rest of the country as a low tax haven for dodgy businessmen and financial speculators right across the world. It’s why one international politician declared Britain to be one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, because of the safety it provides to gangster right across the continent and the globe to launder their ill-gotten gains. The Tories are quite comfortable with this vile situation, and will do everything they can to protect it as far as possible, up to and including Brexit.