From the BBC:
Public Accounts Committee member, Ian Swales, MP, said the large profits made raised serious questions about whether the deals to finance, build and maintain hospitals and schools under PFI were good value for money for the taxpayer in the first place.
"By definition, that means the taxpayer got a bad deal at the start, or there wouldn't have been these super-profits to be made."
Exactly.
From The Council That Brought Us 'The Empty Box'...
18 minutes ago
6 comments:
So can we rely on seeing heads rolling in the public sector offices and departments which agreed the terms?
Ah.... of course not.
FT, the problem is, you probably can't sack all the civil servants who signed up to these deals, because they no longer work for the civil service - they took early retirement bungs and now work for PFI companies as 'consultants'.
Hmmm. Good point.
David Muchwealthier, a totally disinterested spokesperson for industry body "no risk easy profits are what we prefer, thank you" says "there aren't that many practically no risk ways to make ooodles of easy money like this just now and I know a well placed accountant or two who is very well paid to provide incontrovertible evidence that no risk easy profits is the most efficient way to run a business like ours, as opposed to other methods which carry the big risk of not achieving similar levels of payback so we would very much please like you to stick with making us plenty of opportunities to grab what we can from PFI in this way for ever, thank you"
Ah, but you're assuming the purpose of PFI was to get a good deal.
Its real purpose was to keep government debt off the balance sheet.
AC, maybe so, but it was still an expensive and cack-handed way of doing it.
There are cheaper ways of keeping the debt off the balance sheet and I'm not even sure if UK governments care about public sector debts any more anyway - the extra few billion which PFI kept off-balance sheet pale into insignificance nowadays.
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