I AM responding to the letters by Dave Watts in the Star on the 4th September and also to one of your readers “There Have Been Too Many Cuts In The Health Service,”of 28th August.

Clearly, neither of these people took the time to read properly my letter of the 14th August, instead they used valuable space to launch an ill-informed personal attack.

In my letter I said that I welcomed Labour’s commitment to rebuild our hospitals and schools, but condemned them for using the PFI initiative to fund the project. Let me quote a comment from a report to the Public Accounts Committee in 2012

“PFI was considered a key building block for infrastructure projects but the Government’s accounts show the value of future commitments under PFI schemes was £131.5bn — four times the value of the assets secured through the deals.”

That means taxpayers are paying around £132bn for assets worth a mere £34bn. Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the powerful Committee of Public Accounts, described the figures in the first audited Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) as “staggering.”

Dave Prentis, General Secretary of Unison, said, “The NHS is just the start of the story. We’re sitting on a PFI debt time bomb, and the sheer scale of the burden paints a seriously grim picture for the future of our public services. PFI has left the UK with a staggering mountain of debt.”

If Dave thinks that PFI was a good deal for the NHS then he clearly needs to seek help — had the money been borrowed through the normal channels, it would have increased the budget deficit. Labour cynically hid it behind PFI.

As for the reader who accused me of wearing blue tinted spectacles, which I assume that he or she means that I am on the right of politics, I refer him to Dave’s letter, and request that he or she gets their facts right before quoting statistics — there are more doctors in the NHS than in 2010 and although the actual number of nurses in the NHS is less, many have moved to support services and are not included in the statistics.

Mike Perry