Dr Eamonn Butler

UK Health Secretary Andrew Lansley says that patient care is under threat at over 60 NHS hospitals which are 'on the brink of financial collapse' because of costly Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes. This is particularly disappointing to those of us at the Adam Smith Institute who campaigned for private financing of public infrastructure projects as far back as the early 1980s. What went wrong?

The UK government plans to scrap the £12bn National Health Service IT scheme, commissioned by the Blair-Brown administration, and which was supposed to join up the provision of health care, linking patient records, family doctors, hospital consultants, nurses, pharmacists, managers and all the rest. The announcement comes as no surprise – from its outset, the scheme (originally and over-optimistically predicted to come in at around £2bn) always looked  like a mess.

It should be no surprise that the IMF has cut its world growth forecasts. We had it coming. In the UK, the Office of Budget Responsibility's growth forecasts always looked wildly optimistic – 1.8%, they were predicting back in november. Now the IMF says UK growth will be a mere 1.1% in 2011, and 1.6% in 2012. Even that, I figure is on the optimistic side, and the IMF admits there's 6:1 odds of us going negative.