£1.5bn hospital building plan

A £1.5 billion wave of new hospitals will be built under the controversial private finance initiative (PFI), the Government has announced.

Six new hospitals will open across England from 2010. Up to half the beds at the hospitals will be in single rooms "in a shift away from large, public wards", the Department of Health said.

Under the plans, hospitals will be built in Leicester, Torbay in Devon, North Staffordshire, Tameside and Glossop, Salford and Walsall.

Health Minister Andy Burnham said the scheme would lead to new A&E departments as well as cancer and mental health facilities.

The projects have caused deep controversy with some running into severe financial problems. The critics said PFI is a "money-making racket" for private companies and represents a waste of money.

Reports in 2002 by the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Commons Public Accounts Committee highlighted private companies' ability to make significant sums by refinancing debts to take advantage of improved interest rates.

Mike Jackson, senior national officer at Unison, said: "Of course we welcome news that patients will benefit from bright, new hospital surroundings, but using PFI to finance these schemes is a waste of taxpayers' money. PFI schemes are expensive, inflexible and are adding to the current financial burdens of many hospital trusts."

Geoff Martin from the pressure group Health Emergency, said: "For the Government to be signing off a new raft of PFI schemes, despite the fact we know they are extremely bad value, are a money-making racket for the private sector and provide poor quality facilities, flies in the face of any kind of rational thought process."

The former headteacher of one of the first secondary schools to be built through PFI said the initiative had "crippled" the school.

Monica Cross, who resigned in April as head of Highlands School in Enfield, north London, told the Daily Telegraph: "It was naive to think that a commercial company would have a social conscience. It's a huge waste of public money."