Now Is the summer/autumn/winter of our discontent

No, it's because the only way you can finance such a huge cost is to effectively sign a long term mortgage with the PFI Funders over a long period. For that reason, PFI Project Agreements are expensive to cancel, or even to make changes. The smart Funders will refinance the contracts several times over their duration, each time negotiating better terms from the new lenders ( because the repayments are guaranteed by the government), so the gap between what the client (eg the NHS) pays every year compared to what the project actually costs to operate, gets bigger and bigger.

 

Ah, deliberately missing the point. Carry on.
Seems like we manage to fund hundreds of Billions of £ for all manner of things, it was a political choice to tie it to private finance instead of government bond borrowing or whatever.

 

What point have I missed?
When the PFI 'mortgage' is paid the assets become the property of the state?

You do realise that the Tories pulled PFI virtually overnight when they came into government?

 

I thought the whole point of PFI funding was a way to privatise the NHS without actually having the balls to say we are privatising the NHS.
As an added bonus its also a superb way to fund all the promises you made when trying to get elected and then when you get in you realise theres no money to pay for any of them. Boris uses a different approach which is to tell you that hes carried out his promises, you believe him and only realise that its a lie when your leg is hanging off and you arrive at the shiny new hospital only to realise its a field of cattle with a planning notice stuck on the gate

 

Are you sure about that?
"In October 2018, the then-chancellor Philip Hammond announced that the UK government would no longer use PFI; however, PFI projects will continue to operate for some time to come". Wiki

 

Yes sure, Hammond was referring to those already past Financial Close and already operating. No new PFIs since they came to power, but as I said previously, existing contracts are difficult and expensive to terminate. So the Tories would have had to buy-out, then fund the contracts directly from the public purse.

 

My point about it being a political choice. Should the Tories wish to interfere they would first have to buy out the contracts and naturally the PFI companies would make that as hard as possible. Meanwhile, expensive though it might be surely this is a kind of ring fence around these projects to prevent future governments meddling which was the unwritten cough, cough point of it?
Yes I know it wasn't a labour idea, John major started it. Perhaps Labour found them very difficult to deal with subsequently and had an ah-ha moment.

 

No, there is no ring fencing to stop political interference, just contractual requirements that safeguard the interests of the funders and operators who have taken over full financial and operational risk for a period of up to 40 years. Anyone can step in at any time, several NHS Trusts have done so. There are also stringent default and termination triggers linked to the performance of the service provision.

The problem being that anyone wishing to do so has to seek an alternative service provider to step in, or set up a new estates department to bring the service back in-house, which in itself is a vast undertaking and cost.

 

There’s nothing wrong with PFIs the problem is the civil servants are useless negotiate a commercial contract.

I worked for the NHS at the time and after for the MOD and it wasn’t shocking the amount of wastage and general lack of understanding

 

Isn’t that one of the issues with public ownership and public funding. Unlike a private business where if you mismanaged the finances you go out of business. With public funding the money just keeps turning up. Look at the bbc, they’ve had to start shifting their highest paid earners off of the books to try to hide what they are paying them. But you still end up with Gary Lineaker getting paid over a million quid to host a highlight show and the odd jolly up at cup finals and tournaments. I’m sure it’s no different in the NHS and education and the armed forces. I bet we’d be horrified if we knew the true extent of what gets wasted in public bodies.

 

Talking about wasting money perhaps you should tell us roughly what Brexit fiasco has cost the Uk then Rusty

 

But ..but … we got bloo passports!

 

I don’t consider Brexit a waste of money. I consider it money well spent to secure the sovereignty our country for generations to come.

Here is I’m sure one of your heroes explaining why Brexit is good for British workers and I agree with everything he says. I don’t consider being able to enact your own laws a fiasco and neither does Mick Lynch.




Again I think this is just another example of how I’m more socialist and care about workers rights more than a lot of the Labour remainers who believe in big wage increases for high earning strikers and handing over the protections of workers rights to unelected European bureaucrats.
Power to the people

 

But Rusty How much money has it wasted the Taxpayers ?

 

You keep using the word wasted. So I will tell you how much I think it’s wasted. Zero. Because I don’t think spending money protecting workers in this country is wasting it. It would appear that the boss of one of the biggest unions in this country agrees with me.