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Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey has admitted working on controversial NHS private finance (PFI) deals that handed millions of pounds-worth of property to private companies.
Long-Bailey admitted PFI deals were “the only game in town” in the NHS when she was working as a corporate lawyer for Hill Dickinson.
She has previously criticised the contracts and claimed that she worked as “a solicitor for the NHS” before becoming an MP, but on Wednesday conceded “you couldn’t not work on PFI”.
PFI deals were a Conservative policy to use private sector cash to invest in schools and hospitals and other infrastructure schemes, and were adopted by New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
They have been heavily criticised for saddling taxpayers with huge long-term costs while handing out enormous profits for some firms.
Long-Bailey’s close ally John McDonnell pledged in 2017 that a Labour government would scrap new PFI deals for all public services and review existing contracts, bringing them back into public ownership “if necessary”.
Long-Bailey has now admitted that she worked for a team at Hill Dickinson responsible for drawing up PFI contracts.
BuzzFeed News has reported that the deals handed ownership of £190m of NHS property to investment firms based in Luxembourg, which is often described as a tax haven.
Quizzed about her career by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Long-Bailey admitted working in commercial property where she first “experienced the intricacies and the insidious nature of PFI”.
“You couldn’t not work on PFI,” she added.
Asked by Neil how she was “defending the NHS” if she was working on PFI, Long-Bailey appeared to explain how PFI contracts worked.
Asked again how she was defending the health service, Long-Bailey insisted she had “always been vehemently against PFI contracts” and that she “understands how wrong they are”.
Put to her that she was part of a legal team that handed £190m-worth of NHS assets to a Luxembourg investment vehicle, Long-Bailey replied: “I defended the NHS on a daily basis on a whole range of issues.
“Commercial property was one aspect of the work that I did, I worked on comprising local authority contracts to provide joint services of vital necessity to our communities.
“But on the issue of PFI, unfortunately for the NHS it was the only game in town and unfortunately that was the fault of the Conservative government and previous Labour governments.
“Any NHS manager in that NHS at the time - if they wanted to build a new health centre or a new hospital they were only allowed to use PFI and that was wrong.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Long-Bailey also said she regretted failing to directly challenge a Labour member at a recent event in Liverpool over his “anti-Semitic” comments.
The man claimed “members of the Israeli lobby” including Jewish Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge had the greatest responsibility for preventing Jeremy Corbyn from becoming prime minister.
“In my response I thought at the time that I had been implicit in explaining why this particular gentleman was wrong but with retrospect I should’ve called that out directly because it was anti-Semitic,” she said.
“I should have challenged that specific element of that gentleman’s contribution directly and I wish I had done that because it was an anti-Semitic statement to make.”
Long-Bailey was appearing on the show after the overwhelming favourite to win the leadership, shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer declined to identify all of his donors, after coming under pressure to disclose who is funding his Labour leadership campaign.
But he said the biggest donation he has received was £100,000 from fellow lawyer Robert Latham, which was published on parliament’s register of interests on Tuesday.
Starmer criticised “this line of attack” when repeatedly pressed to reveal all of his donors by Neil.
“How can you say I’m hiding behind process when it’s the Labour party process,” he said when pressed on who his five biggest donors are.
“I’ve got a compliance team in place who are checking every donation is in accordance with the rules,” Starmer said.
“Once they’ve done that they pass it to the parliamentary authorities for them to publish it. So two lots have gone up, another lot is with the parliamentary authorities as of today, I’m following the rules.”