Private finance initiative

The private finance initiative (PFI) is a way of creating 'public–private partnerships' (PPPs) where private firms are contracted to complete and manage public projects. Developed initially by the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom, and used extensively there and in Spain, PFI and its variants have now been adopted in many countries as part of the wider programme of privatisation and financialisation, and presented as a means for increasing accountability and efficiency for public spending. According to critics, PFI has been used simply to place a great amount of debt 'off-balance-sheet'.The whole thing has become terribly opaque and dishonest and it's a way of hiding obligations. PFI has now largely broken down and we are in the ludicrous situation where the government is having to provide the funds for the private finance initiative.If you take the private finance out of PFI, you haven’t got much left . . . if you transfer the financial risk back to the public sector, then that has to be reflected in the structure of the contracts. The public sector cannot simply step in and lend the money to itself, taking more risk so that the PFI structure can be maintained while leaving the private sector with the high returns these projects can bring. That seems to us fairly ridiculous.The government's use of PFI has become totally discredited, so we need new ways to leverage private-sector investment . . . Labour's PFI model is flawed and must be replaced. We need a new system that doesn't pretend that risks have been transferred to the private sector when they can't be, and that genuinely transfers risks when they can be . . . On PFI, we are drawing up alternative models that are more transparent and better value for taxpayers. The first step is transparent accounting, to remove the perverse incentives that result in PFI simply being used to keep liabilities off the balance sheet. The government has been using the same approach as the banks did, with disastrous consequences. We need a more honest and flexible approach to building the hospitals and schools the country needs. For projects such as major transport infrastructure we are developing alternative models that shift risk on to the private sector. The current system – heads the contractor wins, tails the taxpayer loses – will end.The truth is the coalition government have made a decision that they want to expand PFI at a time when the value for money credentials of the system have never been weaker. The government is very concerned to keep the headline rates of deficit and debt down, so it's looking to use an increasingly expensive form of borrowing through an intermediary knowing the investment costs won't immediately show up on their budgets.Getting the private sector to build and run prisons has brought tangible benefits. One is speed: private jails are built in as little as two years, rather than the seven that they used to take when the government did the building. Running costs are lower too, mainly because staff are paid a quarter less than in the public sector (though senior managers are paid more) and get fewer benefits.We now have indexed payments for the next 35 years which at a time of growing concern over NHS budgets can only be a millstone. It isn't just that our scheme was expensive. Its very existence distorts whatever else needs to happen in this part of London and beyond. And that is before we get to paying for the much larger scheme at Bart's and the London in a few years' time.'A hospital with a PFI scheme contractually bound to keep the maintenance up – and if you are spending 10 or 15 per cent on your buildings it means all the other efficiency and productivity gains you need have to come out of only 85 or 90 per cent of your budget.'Local authorities and health authorities have very good final-salary pension schemes. We have surveyed contractors in 'best value' deals. At only one company in the past three years was any pension provided. And that is the pattern across the public sector – not just in local government, and not just 'best value'. It happens in PFI too. TUPE does not apply to pensions. The Government is supposed to have revised TUPE, integrating the Acquired Rights Directive from the EU. That has not happened.'It is a bit like taking out a pretty big mortgage in the expectation your income is going to rise, but the NHS is facing a period where that is not going to happen. Money is being squeezed and the size of the repayments will make it harder for some to make the savings it needs to. I don't see why the NHS can't go back to its lenders to renegotiate the deals, just as we would with our own mortgages.'When private companies take on a PFI project, they are deemed to acquire risks the state would otherwise have carried. These risks carry a price, which proves to be remarkably responsive to the outcome you want. A paper in the British Medical Journal shows that before risk was costed, the hospital schemes it studied would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. After the risk was costed, they all tipped the other way; in several cases by less than 0.1%.It's a costly and inefficient way of delivering services. It's meant to mean a transfer of risk, but when things go wrong the risk stays with the public sector and, at the end of the day, the public, because the companies expect to get paid. The health board should now be seeking an exit from this failed arrangement with Consort and at the very least be looking to bring facilities management back in-house.acute embarrassment of the early days of PFI, when investors in projects made millions of pounds from refinancings and it turned out that the taxpayer had no right to any share in the gains ... Investors in one of the early prison projects, for example, made a £14m windfall gain and hugely increased rates of return when they used falling interest rates to refinance.LEAs often seek to withhold crucially important financial information about matters such as affordability and value for money. In addition, the complexity of many PFI projects means that governors, teachers and support staff are often asked to “take on trust” assurances about proposals which have important implications for them.There are already one or two PFI hospitals where wards and wings are standing empty because nobody wants to buy their services. There will be a temptation to say 'right we are stuck with these contracts so we will close down older hospitals', which may in fact be lower cost. Just closing down non-PFI hospitals in order to up activity in the PFI ones is not going to be the answer because we may have the wrong kind of services in the wrong places. The private finance initiative (PFI) is a way of creating 'public–private partnerships' (PPPs) where private firms are contracted to complete and manage public projects. Developed initially by the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom, and used extensively there and in Spain, PFI and its variants have now been adopted in many countries as part of the wider programme of privatisation and financialisation, and presented as a means for increasing accountability and efficiency for public spending. According to critics, PFI has been used simply to place a great amount of debt 'off-balance-sheet'. PFI has been controversial in the UK; the National Audit Office felt in 2003 that it provided good value for money overall. However, in 2011 the Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee found that 'PFI should be brought on balance sheet. The Treasury should remove any perverse incentives unrelated to value for money by ensuring that PFI is not used to circumvent departmental budget limits. It should also ask the OBR to include PFI liabilities in future assessments of the fiscal rules'. The private finance initiative (PFI) is a procurement method which uses private sector investment in order to deliver public sector infrastructure and/or services according to a specification defined by the public sector. It is a sub-set of a broader procurement approach termed Public Private Partnership (PPP), with the main defining characteristic being the use of project finance (using private sector debt and equity, underwritten by the public) in order to deliver the public services. Beyond developing the infrastructure and providing finance, private sector companies operate the public facilities, sometimes using former public sector staff who have had their employment contracts transferred to the private sector through the TUPE process which applies to all staff in a company whose ownership changes. A public sector authority signs a contract with a private sector consortium, technically known as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV). This consortium is typically formed for the specific purpose of providing the PFI. It is owned by a number of private sector investors, usually including a construction company and a service provider, and often a bank as well. The consortium's funding will be used to build the facility and to undertake maintenance and capital replacement during the life-cycle of the contract. Once the contract is operational, the SPV may be used as a conduit for contract amendment discussions between the customer and the facility operator. SPVs often charge fees for this go-between 'service'. PFI contracts are typically for 25–30 years (depending on the type of project); although contracts less than 20 years or more than 40 years exist, they are considerably less common. During the period of the contract the consortium will provide certain services, which were previously provided by the public sector. The consortium is paid for the work over the course of the contract on a 'no service no fee' performance basis.