After Carillion and Capita, is PFI itself on the critical list?

Private providers have been entrusted with much of Britain’s infrastructure: even hospitals. What does the future hold now?

Long before the collapse last month of Carillion, one of the government’s go-to outsourcing and building groups, the signs of strain inside Whitehall over the future of financing public projects with private cash were clear. Since 2010 the government has signed 80 contracts under the private finance initiative (PFI). In the 13 years before 2010 it signed 620.

The figures are a measure of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s enthusiasm for shaking up the way public sector bodies financed the building of schools, hospitals and prisons, and the reluctance of the coalition government to keep the programme on anything more than life support.

Continue reading... February 03, 2018 at 09:30PM