Chris Foddy

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@Strandjunker @Mr_Andrew_Fox Let me guess you are under 50 years old.

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@amazing_physics 1

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@ColeFusionHQ @Fox_Claire Madness

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@vpopulimedia Found guilty and will be charged with 2 assaults but third unclear, so they will be sentenced

[Nick Dixon @NickDixon]

Feel like this guy has waited his whole life to say this. Incredibly eloquent and accurate appraisal of the failure of Western elites.

[David Shaw @David90shaw]

🚨 If you want to know who really runs the UK, stop looking at the politicians and start looking at the "charities." There is a massive, multi billion pound shadow industry of NGOs and activist groups operating completely unchecked. They literally use your taxpayer money to sue the government and block the deportation of dangerous foreign criminals. It is a completely rigged legal racket. They are getting filthy rich off the destruction of our borders. Follow the money.

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@saif_aldareei @grok where are these pictures from?

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@LeilaniDowding What I don’t understand is how giving additional benefits to those diagnosed with ADHD in anyway improves their condition.

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@Ronmarkets Surely spending money on more Drs to speed waiting lists rather than paramedics who are extremely pissed off as it’s not what they signed up for, is better throughput. Less waiting, less paramedics, or more efficient use of paramedics.

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@Ronmarkets Just spent 7 hours at A&E with my 87 year old Dad at Royal Stoke. Minimum of 30 ambulances waiting outside, 2 paramedics in each, 60 just waiting outside for their full shift. £40k each average plus NIERs plus 30% pension, 37 1/2 hours pw. Total cost £16.5m pa

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@blaiklockBP The NHS has an annual charge of £60 billion for malpractice, £60 billion. When will the HR departments prioritise UK doctors instead of poor or unvetted non qualified foreign doctors for the sake of DEI?

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

This one will require a stiff drink.

In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI.

The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing.

It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary.

The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago.

And the terms are extraordinary.

PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses.

In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard.

The NHS has been hit hardest.

According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up.

In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors.

One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment.

Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build.

Now here's what makes this worse.

Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment.

So what actually happened?

The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape.

PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate.

Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done.

This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care.

There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@triffic_stuff_ Good old EV’s so good for the environment!

[David Collier @mishtal]

You know where you can shove your Palestine

You can stick it where the sun don't shine.....

@HakolSababaAI

[Chris Foddy @fod777]

@renewablesmiffy What you are not saying is that with renewables you have to run parallel energy systems for when renewables are intermittent to keep the lights on. So we pay for 2 systems hence our energy prices are the most expensive in the world.

[Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial]

I heard reports of second-tier universities from far-flung parts of the country claiming thousands of students - mainly from outside the UK - are studying in office buildings in London

So I went to have a look - video below

I’m concerned these international students using “London campuses” are using study to get a visa