News

PFI protest puts a new doctor in the house

In the election’s only real upset, retired consultant rheumatologist Richard Taylor won a landslide victory in Kidderminster, ousting sitting MP David Lock from what should have been a safe Labour seat on a turnout significantly higher than the national average.

‘I’m absolutely thrilled, honoured and delighted that the people have had faith in me’, said an astonished Dr Taylor.

The result is widely seen as a local protest against health authority plans to downgrade services at Kidderminster Hospital in favour of a new hospital being built in Worcester, 30 miles away. Kidderminster has already lost local accident and emergency services and its intensive care unit.

But crucially, the new Worcester Royal Infirmary is being funded through the Private Finance Initiative, the controversial scheme introduced by the Conservatives in which capital is raised by a private sector consortium which then designs, builds and operates major public sector projects such as hospitals.

An analysis of the Worcester project by a team from University College London lead by Professor Allyson Pollock, a trenchant critic of PFI schemes in the NHS, claimed last year that the cost of the new hospital ‘escalated by 118 per cent during negotiations, from £49m in 1996 to £108m in 1999, necessitating the closure of Kidderminster Hospital’.

But the health authority and local campaigners – who have now achieved the remarkable position of having a majority on the local council as well as their own MP – remain at loggerheads.