News Release

Capital Charges Are A Tax On The National Health Service

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

(Capital charges: a tax on the NHS. Worse may follow as NHS assets are privatised)

In an editorial in this week's BMJ, Dr Allyson Pollock from St George's Hospital Medical School, writes that on average NHS trusts are paying out nine per cent of their annual revenue income on capital charges. She argues that the only means of addressing this is for NHS trusts to increase their income, which they could only do at the expense of other trusts, or reduce their assets, which would mean taking facilities out of the service they provide (capital charging has been compared to a "windows tax" for this reason). A third option is to liquidate public assets under the private finance initiative.

As privately financed hospitals and services (PFI) are free from the capital charging regimen, the author says that a "bizarre phenomenon" is created whereby privately financed hospitals and services are effectively being funded by a tax on those in public ownership.

Dr Pollock writes that the capital charges system has created a leak of NHS funds from the public to the private sector and she concludes by posing the question ëwill the liquidation of public sector assets be followed by the privatisation of the costs of care?'.

Contact:

Dr Allyson Pollock, Senior Lecturer in Public Health Medicine or Declan Gaffney, Researcher St George's Hospital Medical School, London

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