They didn't. A lot of the PFI hospitals were built on new land. The reason why PFI happened was because most of the spending under Blair went to staff, which didn't improve output/capacity. The UK is stuck in the worst of all worlds: we are more expensive than almost every private system, we don't have choice, we can't increase capacity, there is no money to pay for anything.

Taxes are close to the highest ever, govt spending is at the highest level outside war...there isn't money for £50bn in infrastructure projects. Blair made that choice with far lower debt, it is 4-5x higher now.

No-one is proposing real solutions, they are just proposing that we keep digging our way into this hole.