#pfi

Poll For Initiative has returned with the Descent campaign, now having @benjaminutes as the player this time, with his DND blood hunter character Alestain [he/him].

The rat is his son, Harry. He is Large, full of love, and best boy, you can not change my mind.

bonus shots under the read more to show off the line less render

Nat 20 charisma check 🧡

The Hadfield wing was closed in December after fire officers ordered hospital bosses to shut it until remedial work could be carried out on its walls.

The building was opened in 2007 after being constructed under a private finance initiative contract by Japanese company Kajima. A majority stake in the contract was sold to Guernsey-based investment fund HICL in 2011, with the NHS paying more than £3.5m in interest, rent, repaying the lease and operating costs to the contract owners in the 12 months before the wing was closed.

Health service campaigners in Sheffield said the building is a prime example of what a poor deal taxpayers get out of PFI. Over the course of the contract, the NHS is scheduled to pay £122m in total – over £96m more than if the wing had been paid for upfront.

Catherine McAndrew, from Sheffield Save Our NHS, said: “The Robert Hadfield Wing is a perfect example of the rip off that is PFI. By the time the contract is over, we will have paid the contract holders £122m for a hospital wing that cost £25.9m for which we have already paid £37m.

“Kajima and HICL’s shareholders have had more than enough from us. PFI contracts such as these should be renationalised and brought back in house so this money can be spent on caring for patients rather than the profits of private companies.

“It is an added insult that the wing has had to close for not meeting fire safety standards despite the contract holders being given almost a million pounds last year to maintain the wing.

“We will be putting in a Freedom of Information request to the hospital trust to ascertain whether this constitutes a breach of contract.”

You may never have heard of Carillion. There’s no reason you should have. Its lack of glamour is neatly summed up by the name it sported in the 90s: Tarmac. But since then it has grown and grown to become the UK’s second-largest building firm – and one of the biggest contractors to the British government. Name an infrastructure pie in the UK and the chances are Carillion has its fingers in it: the HS2 rail link, broadband rollout, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the Library of Birmingham. It maintains army barracks, builds PFI schools, lays down roads in Aberdeen. The lot.

There’s just one snag. For over a year now, Carillion has been in meltdown. Its shares have dropped 90%, it’s issued profit warnings, and it’s on to its third chief executive within six months. And this week, the government moved into emergency mode. A group of ministers held a crisis meeting on Thursday to discuss the firm. Around the table, reports the FT, were business secretary Greg Clark, as well as ministers from the Cabinet Office, health, transport, justice, education and local government. Even the Foreign Office sent a representative.

That roll call says all you need to know about the public significance of what happens next at Carillion. This is a firm that employs just under 20,000 workers in Britain – and the same again abroad. It has a huge chain of suppliers – and its habit of going in for joint ventures with other construction businesses means that a collapse at Carillion would send shockwaves through the industry and through the government’s public works programme.

To see what this means, take the HS2 rail link, where Carillion this summer was part of a consortium that won a £1.4bn contract to knock tunnels through the Chilterns. If Carillion goes under, what happens to the largest infrastructure project in Europe? What happens to its partners on the deal, British firm Kier, and France’s Eiffage? The project will need to be put back and the taxpayer will almost certainly have to step in.

Imagine that same catastrophe befalling dozens of other projects across the UK and you get a sense of what’s at stake. Jobs will be cut, schools will go unbuilt (just a couple of months ago, Oxfordshire county council pulled the plug on a 10-year schools project) – and the government’s entire private finance initiative (PFI) model for building this country’s essential services will be shaken to the core. The dirty secret of PFI and all government attempts to pass public services into the private realm is that the shareholders make profits while the taxpayers remain on the hook for any losses.

After all, this isn’t the only case where the public sector’s reliance on one giant private-sector player endangers the provision of basic services. As my colleague Rob Davies reports in today’s paper, crisis-hit Four Seasons Health Care has run into yet another roadblock in its rescue talks. If those negotiations fail, then the big question will be who will look after the 17,000 elderly and vulnerable people in its care.

Or look at rail, where as I wrote this week, transport secretary Chris Grayling has come to a disastrous deal (sorry, “pragmatic solution”) to allow Virgin Trains to get out of their contract to run the East Coast mainline three years early. The public will have to step into the breach with some makeshift arrangements and will forego hundreds of millions in lost franchise payments. The train operators will be able to go about their business and even take on new franchises.

Should Carillion go down, there will be another truckload of questions for Grayling. He awarded the firm its £1.4bn HS2 contract last July – by which time the writing was already on the wall. That job from the Department of Transport may have helped tide Carillion over for a bit – but why did the transport secretary give the work to a company that was already in existential difficulties? A firm known to have grown too quickly by borrowing hundreds of millions. A firm that just a few months later came under investigation of the Financial Conduct Authority. I have long thought that Grayling is less serious minister and more an unexploded landmine. I just wonder what the trigger will be.

But what happens to that minister is just one debacle of many as far as Carillion is concerned. Today you may never have heard of Carillion. Soon you may wish it had remained that way.

A day that changed forever the face of the campaign to protect the street tree heritage and save the reputation of this great green? city...

Rustlings Road 12 noon, 14 year old Tom sums it all up...’It’s meant to be a green city and they’re chopping down the trees. It doesn’t really make sense’ 

Nov. 17th 2016 was a dark, dark day fro democracy in Sheffield & the UK. As perhaps is this week in the light of the ‘coincidental’ reporting by the Sheffield TELEGRAPH showing a front page of, - not the 99.9% of happy, arb-friendly Tree Protectors who have campaigned to preserve their very special Sheffield Street Treescape - no, the Telegraph chose to go with a masked tree protector who just did not want to be recognised because of the tactics of Sheffield City Council in their injunctions and ‘evidence gatherers’ who have even followed people back to their own homes.

Watch the FILM HERE>   14 year old TOM   

At 7am (17/11/16) I awoke to see the devastation happening in Rustlings Rd on Facebook and immediately set out for Sheffield. To do what I did not know. To meet and hopefully support them, yes I guess, but what else could be done? It was an experience I would not want to repeat. I still have film I have not shown. Of folks so deeply upset and I guess in shock at what had just happened.

#TreeHeroes Jenny Hockey & Freda Brayshaw.

Bearing in mind that only at 4:35am Sheffield City Council had issued on their own website a document that had been due out in the summer stating that 5 or 6 of the trees on Rustlings road could and should be retained, easily, cheaply. They were NOT DANGEROUS! 30 minutes later they started to CUT THEM DOWN, IN THE DARKNESS OF EARLY MORNING. Unsafe & illegal working practices at 5am. Many residents having been threatened with their cars being towed away, and eventually two lovely ladies in their 70′s - Jenny Hockey & Freda Brayshaw...yes you read this correctly. 70+ year old Grannies taken away to jail along with a chap (unknown). Only to be later told as they entered the court after months of worry & stress that all charged had been dropped. (Of course this was after our great friend lawyer Paul Powesland had come in free to defend our proper rights) and show the laws they used were incorrect & illegal.

Watch the FILM HERE > SUSAN says it as she sees it

In case we need reminding of just how bad Sheffield City Council got things. Not just on this day of course but theirs was the worst day, and a TURNING POINT in the campaign. The world media reported the evnets. Sheffield City Council eventually issued an apology of sorts.

Watch FILM HERE  > CALVIN talks of riot squads

See where they dumped DELILAH in the Amey Depot. Watch FILM HERE > DELILAH in Amey Depot

The national media and politician Nick Clegg rightfully slated the tactics and actions carried out on this dark day in Sheffield history.

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