He’s right you know, the Private Finance Initiative is a right old dog’s breakfast. He doesn’t actually offer a solution, I’m sure because he regards it as obvious, to stop the PFI and return to direct public funding.

So what has the
government learned from all this? Nothing. It is ideologically
committed to part-privatisation. It won’t disclose how much it is
planning to spend on PFI schemes – a spokesperson at the Treasury says
this is "commercially confidential" – but it is locked into £3.6bn of
new deals this year. According to a spokesman for the Department of
Health: "The government has no intention of abandoning PFI." The heap
of blood and feathers, though brain dead, keeps running.

So
the government fobs us off with spin, misreporting and lies. PFI, the
Treasury tells us, "is a small but important part of the government’s
strategy for delivering high-quality public services". Small? £42bn has
been officially committed so far. This, according to the
public-spending specialist Professor Allyson Pollock, is an
underestimate, covering only the 43% of PFI contracts classified as
"off balance sheet".

There is, of course, another alternative. Actually make it private, make the financiers actually bear the real risks.