14. The PFI companies which run PFI schemes are required to submit annual accounts to Companies House. These accounts allow us to identify the amount of income generated by each company from the contracts they hold with the NHS, the amount of this which goes to paying off the debts and loans which have been used to build the hospitals, and the percentage of this which was declared by the company as pre-tax profits or losses, as well as the amount of tax paid.
15. We looked at the pre-tax profit aggregated across all the 107 PFI contracts for which the full data was available. This allows us to establish the profitability of the health sector's 'PFI business' as a whole.
16. From 2010 to 2015 these 107 PFI contracts made a pre-tax profit of £831m. This translated into a post-tax profit of £680m. This profit is in addition to the profits made by the banks on the loans they have made for the building work, by the construction companies which built the hospitals, and by the companies which provide maintenance and other services for the hospital buildings. The PFI companies whose profits are the subject of this report employ only a handful of people whose main role is to receive and allocate the income from the NHS paid by the hospital trusts.
17. However the profits cited above understate the scale of the profitability of these schemes because these figures are reported net of losses. Losses have been made by some PFI companies over these years, primarily due to financial instruments taken out initially to protect against interest rate changes affecting their loan repayments. These losses are not expected to be persistent and will not affect the overall profitability of a PFI contract over its lifetime. So it is reasonable also to look at the gross profits made, disregarding these losses.
18. Without taking losses into account, from 2010 to 2015 the 107 PFI contracts made total pre-tax profits of £971m, which translated into post-tax profits of £810m.
19. The next section examines the proportion of the money that the NHS has paid to these PFI companies over the past 6 years which has left the health service in the form of profit.