This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Private Finance Initiative. It has been arguably the boldest and costliest experiment in public policy ever conducted, resulting in more than £200 billion of public debt, the burden of which will hang over the British taxpayer for decades.
Initiated by the Tories, PFI was ramped up tenfold by Gordon Brown, who used it to get the cost of large infrastructure projects off the national balance sheet. Under Labour it became “the only game in town”, as roads, schools, hospitals, prisons, IT systems and defence contracts were shoehorned into a single approach, without adequate attention to cost or need.
Continue reading "Times op-ed: How not to spend £250bn of taxpayers' cash" »
