The Spectator

BLAIR’S PFI RIP-OFF

Blair's PFI rip-off: PFI exposes the taxpayer to corporate greed without dismantling state monopolies

We are at our best, asserts the Prime Minister, when we are at our boldest. His dictum, however, does not extend to Labour conference delegates, whom he prefers when at their most supine. On Monday, a motion calling for a review of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was carried by 67 per cent to 32 per cent. Far from being impressed by this rare act of boldness from his party, Mr Blair treated it with contempt, announcing on Tuesday that PFI would not be reviewed but accelerated.

One does not have to share the concerns or the ideology of Unison, the union which tabled the successful motion, to recognise that delegates have a point. Many of the PFI projects already completed have turned out to be embarrassing failures. Patients at Carlisle’s new Cumberland Hospital have been forced into armchairs because of a shortage of beds; it contains 75 fewer beds than the hospital it replaced. Haringey Borough Council signed up for a scheme to refurbish its schools without seeming to realise that it excluded ‘furniture and equipment’ – council taxpayers will have to stump up £6 million in extra costs as a result.

Worse, few taxpayers realise the sums which they will eventually be forced to pay for the hundreds of shiny schools, hospitals and prisons springing up all over the land. PFI has been damned in some quarters as ‘privatisation’, but it is nothing of the sort: it is simply the state on a credit-card spree. Under PFI, private companies bid to build a new public building which will then be leased back to the state, usually on a 30-year deal. While it means that large numbers of new buildings can be erected at great speed, taxpayers will still be paying stiff rents for those buildings for a generation to come.

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