ness chiefs as the potential saviour of the floundering Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Shadow Treasury minister Mike O'Brien argues that "This idea must not be allowed to fail. Labour has a clear programme to rescue PFI™ This full-scale retreat follows the back-pedalling of former shadow Health Secretary Harriet Harman, speaking at a UNISON conference on PFI in June. She offered only that a new Labour government would "overhaul"the PFI.
A year earlier her predecessor Margaret Beckett had dismissed the scheme as "totally unacceptable".
UNISON's health conference this year pledged the union to fight for PFI to be scrapped, and for any assets and services handed over to private firms to be repossessed. sessed. accounting" which government minis ters ridiculed when It was implemented by local councils in the 1980s.
The NHS could become increasingly dependent upon hospitals which are owned and run by private firms for profit. Clinical serv. ices, too, could be taken over by greedy city consor.
Socialist Outlook 109 • 7 October 1996.