“NHS financial outlook dire” said the headline (The Press, December 31).

An NHS leader predicts a funding shortfall of up to £54 billion over the next decade.

I wonder just how much of NHS money is being used from their budgets to pay for the ruinous PFI projects that the “prudent” Gordon Brown introduced and implemented copiously to build new hospitals and improvements with private money in order to keep these costs off the national balance sheet?

Money which should be used for medical care in our NHS is now instead being used as repayments to private fund managers, all because of the hubris of that disastrous brooding Scot.

Geoff Robb, Hunters Close, Dunnington, York.