New report on PFI

[jean]

Sept 25, 2017 22:08:33 GMT excoriator said:

We have a lot of decent schools and buildings...

But we can't afford to maintain them.

Oh I forgot - all we need to do is print more money. Somebody should tell them!

[excoriator]

Sept 26, 2017 8:17:37 GMT jean said:

Sept 25, 2017 22:08:33 GMT excoriator said:

We have a lot of decent schools and buildings...

But we can't afford to maintain them.

Oh I forgot - all we need to do is print more money. Somebody should tell them!

I think it's a case of "won't" not "can't". And yes, money is no problem, particularly when it is needed to bribe the DUP into supporting May.

[jean]

They didn't just print the money, though - it's been diverted from other projevts.

And it's a lot less that the amount required to service PFI agreements.

[excoriator]

There is nothing whatsoever the stop this government raising taxes to cover the PFI payments. They have CHOSEN not to though.

I don't understand your obsession with printing money, although it wouldn't worry me if it were. (The money to bail out the bankers was 'printed' and nobody said a word about it.)

[aqua]

Sept 26, 2017 10:15:38 GMT excoriator said:

There is nothing whatsoever the stop this government raising taxes to cover the PFI payments. They have CHOSEN not to though.

I don't understand your obsession with printing money, although it wouldn't worry me if it were. (The money to bail out the bankers was 'printed' and nobody said a word about it.)

This reminds me of when my aged mother, before she was noticeably, but mildly, demented, and about the time banks were starting to get slick, asked the cashier how they could produce so many ten-pound notes out of the machine so quickly; and he simply said, 'we just print it'. And she believed it to her dying day.

[excoriator]

Well, people who claim to be far from demented believe equally ridiculous things about money. Such as governments cannot spend more than they collect in taxes for instance!

[aubrey]

PFI killing trees in Sheffield.


It's not what PFI could be, Exco, it's how it works in practice, like this.

[excoriator]

It is not PFI per se that is wrong, but its misuse by bloody stupid councillors. I have several hefty lengths of really nice oak which I will one day put to good use. I suppose I COULD fashion one into a club and beat myself over the head with it causing considerable pain. The blame for this would, however, lie with me, not with the oak.

[aubrey]

It's always misused, to pretend that you're not paying for something.

[jean]

Sept 28, 2017 20:40:08 GMT excoriator said:

It is not PFI per se that is wrong...

What kind of a socialist thinks it is the business of the State to fill the pockets of hedge fund managers in tax havens with public money?

PFI - PRIVATE Finance Initiative, exco. The clue is in the word PRIVATE.

Jeremy Corbyn would be utterly ashamed of you if he knew.

[excoriator]

I think as a political device for getting us much-needed schools and hospitals it is justified.

Sheffield's use of it is clearly barking mad.

I'm sorry you can't see the difference, but that is your problem not mine.

[jean]

Sept 29, 2017 8:16:30 GMT excoriator said:

I'm sorry you can't see the difference...

There's no difference in kind, exco - just possibly in degree.

In all PFI contracts, it is the company providing the services that has all the power. If they were not going to benefit hugely from the arrangements, they would not enter into them.

The building of shiny new schools and hospitals is not the end of it - the contractors retain the responsibility for maintaining them over the life of the contract. The schools and hospitals are not even permitted to carry out routine maintenance themselves - and while this article refers to the ridiculous amounts charged, there are also the ridiculous waiting times for simple repairs to be considered:

One hospital was reported to have been charged £333 by a PFI firm to change a light bulb, while a school was charged £300 for an electricity socket. Under PFI deals, private firms build, operate and maintain public facilities – such as hospitals, schools and courthouses – on contracts lasting up to 35 years.

When the interests of those providing a service are in conflict with the users of the service, things will not end well. Think of the company that managed Grenfell Tower. Think of G4S and its record in providing prisons and detention centres. You like to point out the uselessness of elected councillors (though oddly enough, when I do the same I'm making political capital) but at least they can be held to account.

...but that is your problem not mine.

If only that were true!

But I can only repeat: ask your mate Jeremy. He knows the truth of the matter.

[excoriator]

Proof by selected incident is worthless. You are not March under another name are you Jean?

Look it's really quite simple. Here are one or two points which you may like to consider

1. There are some things - particularly lie hospitals and schools - that are so important that almost any amount of money is worth spending.
2. It is undoubtedly cheaper to build these things directly, but politically this is simply not possible. There is just too much ill-informed or malicious opposition.
3. A trick which allows these resources to be built is necessary if you are to have them.
4. In war-time. cost is simply not a consideration. If something needs to be done, it is done and nobody complains about the cost of it.
5. Yes, it's expensive, but so is taking on a mortgage. You will pay several times the cost of the house over the period of the loan.
6. It is perfectly possible for a government to review the terms of the PFI during its term and change them if excessive profits are made.
7. I'm not defending PFIs. In a perfect world, or even a fairly reasonable one, they would not be necessary, but we live in a world that is not perfect. You have to use them to get things built.
8. The excessive cost of a PFI for a hospital or a school should be balanced against the savings made in providing better and quicker medical care to patients, or the financial returns from providing a better education before going off on one about how evil all PFIs are.
9. It is no use blaming PFIs for the parlous state of the NHS or education. The real culprit is our piss-poor government and its stupid austerity policy. Blaming PFIs for it is a transparent attempt to blame Blair and Brown for something that is actually THIS government's fault. (PFIs are not the only attempt to shift the blame. Even type 2 diabetics have been blamed for it!)
10. You completely ignore the fact that these PFI facilities are generally much better than what they replaced. My nearest hospital was a crumbling ramshackle workhouse. It is now a splendid gleaming superbly equipped and well-maintained establishment. The new NHS hospital in Liverpool is 100% private rooms and replaces a vile 1960s brutalist block loathed by staff and patients alike.
11. I am really fed up with being backed into defending PFIs. I don't like them either, but I am also fed up with the obsessive and one-sided attacks on them. It is worth remembering that money doesn't mean the same to governments as it does to you and me. They can, if they choose, print as much of it as they need, and they frequently do. Just to stand still to maintain a reasonably stable currency requires that they increase the amount of money by about 7% a year. It seems utterly pointless to obsess - as you do - about the cost of PFIs.

As to your £350 to change a light bulb, I'd have to know a lot more about a light bulb to decide whether this is or isn't a reasonable cost. It might well require scaffolding or the hire of a Cherry-picker to do it. Or the £350 might cover the cost of maintaining ALL the bulbs in a building, where, due to the use of LEDa which last a lot longer, the cost per bulb of repairing ones that fail came out in year one to £350 a replacement.

If you are going to criticise something, then let's have all the facts about it rather than something that reads like a Daily Mail headline!

[jean]

Sept 29, 2017 11:58:24 GMT excoriator said:

11. I am really fed up with being backed into defending PFIs.

Don't defend them, then. Jeremy doesn't.

[jean]

Sept 29, 2017 11:58:24 GMT excoriator said:

9. It is no use blaming PFIs for the parlous state of the NHS or education. The real culprit is our piss-poor government and its stupid austerity policy. Blaming PFIs for it is a transparent attempt to blame Blair and Brown for something that is actually THIS government's fault.

The excellent Professor Allyson Pollock was flagging up the disaster that is PFI as soon as the Labour Government decreed it was the only game in town.

This article, for example, is from 1999, when neither our present government nor the previous one were so much as a gleam in anyone's eye:

...Where structural change requires major investment, the private finance initiative is the only method of financing it. However, the higher cost of the private finance initiative increases the cost pressures on the revenue budgets. The result is service contraction: on average, bed numbers are to be reduced by 31% over the next three to five years...

...The relationship between new investment and service configuration raises questions about the planning process: who is making decisions on future services, and on what basis? When faced with questions about the relative importance of clinical and financial factors in service planning, the government has tended to argue that the crucial decisions are all made by clinicians. Clinical directors are responsible for agreeing and medical directors for approving full business cases; however, healthcare planning has never been a core clinical competence, and making decisions is very different from agreeing to decisions taken by others. This issue was raised earlier this year in correspondence in the Glasgow Herald, in which the Scottish health minister responded to criticism of bed numbers at the controversial Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh private finance initiative scheme by stating, “It is the clinicians who decide on the number of beds.... The assumptions on bed numbers were developed by clinicians.” But one of the clinicians involved in the planning process illustrated the hidden ambiguity in the minister’s statement: “We were told the maximum costs and told how this translated into maximum bed numbers ... and told that we could decide how they should be divided among the various specialties.” On this account, total capacity was determined on financial grounds, and clinical decisions are confined within these predetermined limits. As we shall see, business cases for other private finance initiative schemes lend support to this account of the planning process. In this paper we use the full business cases that are available to evaluate the adequacy and nature of the planning process as judged by the quality of the information and the nature of the evidence...

This also answers your point about how much nicer the new hospitals are - they're also much smaller.