HOSPITAL bosses have got a £17,000 refund after being over-charged for maintenance jobs.

A damning National Audit Office report on private finance schemes found that the Royal Blackburn Hospital had paid £486.54 for a new door lock - when the same job cost Calderdale Hospital just £15.09.

The £113million hospital, which opened under the PFI deal with Consort Healthcare in 2005, also paid £398.30 for a computer network line, a job which cost just £95 under other PFI deals The contract between East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust and Consort was renegotiated under last year's Meeting Patients' Needs clinical services review, resulting in a £17,000 refund.

Despite the charges, the hospital's finance director said the partnership was good value for money.

Chairman of Blackburn's health scrutiny committee Coun Roy Davies said the repayment was "something and nothing" when compared to the £680million in interest the hospital will be forced to pay back over 35 years under the original building deal.

Haden Building Management Ltd, the firm chosen by Consort to carry out all the hospital's maintenance, charged an 8.5 per cent premium on work it did on the hospital from 2005 to 2007.

Under the renegotiation, there is now no extra charge for jobs under £5,000, and a sliding scale of interest between 4 per cent and 8.5 per cent on the more expensive work.

The firm agreed then that the charge for smaller jobs should never have applied, and paid back the cash - but the renegotiation makes no difference to the basic cost charged.

Coun Davies said: "The £17,000 is something and nothing compared to the cost of the entire project, and we are still no nearer to making sure the basic rate charged is sensible.

"We want value for money and we are not getting that. The cost of this deal is astronomical in all sorts of ways."

Stephen Brookfield, director of finance at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust said: "We have a long term contractual relationship with our PFI provider the success of which is crucial to supporting the delivery of high quality services within East Lancashire.

"We believe that in totality the contract delivers good value for money. One of the advantages of this type of agreement is the transparency of pricing and a consistent approach to ongoing maintenance.

A Consort spokesman added: "Consort has been working with the trust to streamline the process for approving and implementing the variations with the intention of reducing the costs."