{"id":40280,"date":"2018-01-18T06:40:31","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T06:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=40280"},"modified":"2018-01-18T06:40:31","modified_gmt":"2018-01-18T06:40:31","slug":"after-fifteen-years-of-my-saying-pfi-does-not-work-the-nao-finally-agrees-why-has-it-taken-so-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2018\/01\/18\/after-fifteen-years-of-my-saying-pfi-does-not-work-the-nao-finally-agrees-why-has-it-taken-so-long\/","title":{"rendered":"After fifteen years of my saying PFI does not work the NAO finally agrees. Why has it taken so long?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the Guardian reports this morning<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Taxpayers will be forced to hand over nearly \u00a3200bn to contractors under private finance deals for at least 25 years, according to a report by Whitehall\u2019s spending watchdog.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the\u00a0collapse of public service provider Carillion, the National Audit Office found little evidence that government investment in more than 700 existing public-private projects has delivered financial benefits.<\/p>\n

The cost of privately financing public projects can be 40% higher than relying solely upon government money, auditors found.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a number of ways I could respond to this, but I am (for once) simply going for the 'told you so' route.<\/p>\n

From 'People's Pensions<\/a>' in 2003, where Colin Hines and I advocated local authority bonds as an alternative to PFI, the the Green New Deal<\/a>, where we developed the theme, to green quantitative easing<\/a>, and then People's Quantitative Easing<\/a>, I can claim some credit in being an anti-PFI campaigner, and always because it was glaringly obvious that it failed to deliver value for money.<\/p>\n

That is 15 years of saying so.<\/p>\n

And now, finally,\u00a0 the NAO catches on.<\/p>\n

Three questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Why has the NAO taken so long to state the obvious?<\/li>\n
  2. When will local authority bonds be part of the UK savings architecture?<\/li>\n
  3. When will People's (or Green, for they are the same<\/a>) QE be used to underpin those bonds via a National Infrastructure Bank, which is an idea Labour borrowed from my work?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We cannot afford to wait for answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    As the Guardian reports this morning: Taxpayers will be forced to hand over nearly \u00a3200bn to contractors under private finance deals for at least 25
     Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-green-new-deal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}