From Jesse Norman, MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, House of Commons, London SW1, UK
John Hutton (“Labour should consider return to public-private partnerships”, August 6) mentions the need to learn the lessons from the UK private finance initiative model for funding public infrastructure. But as several parliamentary reports have shown, those lessons have been learnt, and they are not pretty.
Two days after its election in 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour government fired the PFI regulator, Alastair Ross Goobey, as brilliant an advocate for public accountability as he was for shareholder rights.
There then followed a spending spree in the NHS, the result of which was to create an array of large and extremely expensive bespoke hospitals, a 30-year capital liability of £65bn, and a crippling annual cost to the taxpayer.
In the rush, many of these hospitals were also very badly constructed. In the case of Hereford hospital, an independent investigation discovered disastrous failings in fire prevention, electrical and water systems, and air conditioning which was pushing microbes out from dirty areas of the hospital into clean ones.
There is one recent lesson to be learnt. PFI contracts are normally full repairing leases. As the early ones now enter their final years, the government is coming under huge pressure to renew them, lest the contractors walk away or allow the assets to degrade.
This would be a huge further PFI scandal for the NHS in particular.
But avoiding it means the taxpayer may never be free of the PFI.
Jesse Norman MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, House of Commons, London SW1, UK