ENGLAND’S largest hospital trust was put under special measures yesterday, with campaigners laying the blame squarely at privateers’ feet.

The Care Quality Commission revealed a catalogue of failures including overcrowding, staff shortages and a culture of bullying at east London’s Whipps Cross University Hospital, which — with five others — is run by Barts Health NHS Trust.

The hospital had failed to reorganise after two healthcare assistants were jailed in 2013 for abusing old ladies at the hospital, the commission — which slapped three formal warnings on Whipps Cross at the time — said.

Now staff are overstretched, agency workers left untrained and Whipps Cross consistently fails to meet national targets for waiting times, according to the inspectors who carried out a six-day inspection in November.

Since the inspection the CQC has issued four warnings demanding the trust improve patient care, assessments, staffing levels and complaints handling.

Hospitals inspections supremo Sir Mike Richards said the Barts trust had “not given sufficient priority to safety.”

“There is a large section of the population in east London who depend on this hospital and they are entitled to services which provide safe, effective, compassionate and high quality care,” he said.

But Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) chair Professor Sue Richards said inspectors had failed to blame Barts’s huge debt burden, unleashed when the health service was thrown open to profiteers under the private finance initiative.

“Barts’s PFI scheme is one of the worst in the NHS,” she said.

“Earlier this year we were told that the hospital would be in deficit of £43 million this year. Now it is more likely to be £93m. No doubt the extra £50m will also be found by cutting staff and reducing services to vulnerable patients.

“Barts’ PFI scheme is clearly not viable and health services for millions of people are being put at risk to line the pockets of the ‘investors’ who lent the money.

“This deal was signed off by government and they should now come in and pick up the pieces rather than continuing to wash their hands and absolve themselves from responsibility.”

Labour shadow health secretary Andy Burnham branded the report “another warning for David Cameron that understaffed hospitals are putting patients at risk on his watch.”

He said: “Across England, more than half of nurses now say their ward is dangerously understaffed, and more believe patient safety has got worse than better.

“The truth is that by wasting £3 billion on a damaging reorganisation and causing a crisis in A&E, David Cameron is making care problems more likely, not less.

“The NHS as we know it can’t survive another five years of the Tories’ failing plan.”

Trust chief executive Peter Morris said he was “very sorry” for the failings identified.