Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I thank the then members of the Economic Affairs Committee for preparing such a thorough report on the use of private finance to deliver public projects. I extend my gratitude to all those noble Lords, whose contributions to today’s debate I have found invaluable. I spend a lot of my time here answering for things that are not in my direct area of policy responsibility, but I am pleased that on this occasion there were not 50 Members of this House talking about such areas, many of which I know little about, but half a dozen valuable contributions on something on which I know a little. I was a director of Partnerships UK between 1992 and 1996. It is also a pleasure and a daunting challenge to follow one of the world’s great experts on PFI—the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe—and to have this debate kicked off by my noble friend Lord Vallance of Tummel, with whom I worked in a small capacity a number of years back when he was taking one of our biggest pieces of national infrastructure, British Telecom, into the private sector.
At the outset, I should stress that it is clear that public/private partnerships will continue to play an important role in underpinning our country’s future infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, reminded us how much has been done. A number of times we have been reminded that this effort has gone through several Administrations, which have now been led by the three main parties in this country. We share a commitment to learning the lessons and making such projects better but also to continuing with them, which is what the committee’s report suggests. The report highlights where private finance has brought valuable disciplines to infrastructure planning and implementation.
Many of the questions and comments today have reminded me that there are quite a number of challenges to improve the model going forward. I will do my best to answer a number of those questions now, but I will write on points that I fail to pick up or where, on reflection, I could have given a fuller answer.
I turn first to some of the balance sheet questions—I ask noble Lords to forgive me if I do not refer to them by name each time on points that they have raised—which were brought up by my noble friend Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. We are constrained here because we are bound by European accounting requirements that set the framework for how each project is recorded in the national accounts. However, I recognise that these requirements can make it difficult to get a clear picture of the public sector’s commitments, which is something that we must remedy. It is the Government’s policy to ensure that future liabilities are made obvious to the public and that complex financial instruments, such as PFI, should not hide the true cost of investments that the Government have made. Such practices are completely out of step with our strong transparency agenda but also risk the endorsement of projects that do not represent good value to the taxpayer.
For that reason, we have already taken action to bring greater transparency to PPPs. It has been a long time coming, but I can confidently say that next year we will publish, for the first time, whole of government accounts, which will be prepared according to international accounting standards. This will ensure that the vast majority of PFI transactions will appear on balance sheet. In future, we will also publish details of all new government contracts valued at more than £25,000, including PPP agreements. This will enable members of the public to assess the ongoing costs of long-term commitments, and will complement the existing reporting of PFI commitments disclosed on the Treasury’s website.
A second area of concern to us and to speakers in this debate has been funding for local government and government departments. There were questions around ring-fencing, bias and so on. Ring-fencing, in particular, meant that government departments and local authorities could use PFI as a means to increase their budgets, with potential for diverting funds away from more beneficial areas—those which offered greater value for money. In answer to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, I stress that, in this regard as well as in other dimensions, the Government absolutely want to do whatever they can to remove any bias over alternative ways of public procurement, including over public versus private financing. We have already taken action to address the particular problem of ring-fencing by removing the existing ring-fence and transferring financial responsibility for the grants back to the relevant government department. This will place all procurement options on a level playing field and ensure that merit rather than increased budgets determine which projects should go ahead.
That leads me on to the impact of PFPs on departments. In answer to my noble friend Lord MacGregor’s concern, we will continue to monitor all PFI contracts and information on the flow of payments under those contracts. Of course it is the case that, following the spending review, the budgets for departments will be constrained. Our initial analysis, which we did in conjunction with the spending review, suggests that this should not cause any department a significant problem. However, we will continue to monitor the level of commitments that are being made.
Some speakers have stressed the need for a national infrastructure bank, while others have questioned it and I think that my noble friend Lord Newby offered some mixed messages. My noble friend reminded us of the strong private sector appetite for investment in infrastructure and drew particular attention to sovereign wealth funds. Certainly, my discussions with sovereign wealth funds—both here and on a recent trip to the Gulf—and my discussions with long-term investors, insurance companies and others suggest that there is a strong, latent demand. I can assure my noble friend that we are taking new steps across government to make sure that we co-ordinate our contacts with sovereign wealth funds and with a range of the largest actual or prospective inward investors into the UK. His point is well taken. He challenged me to say whether this has translated into action yet. Of course, it is early days, but we are certainly starting with the co-ordination so that we can understand what investors want and channel their appetite—in so far as it is in the Government’s gift to do that—appropriately. When I was in the Gulf, I had a couple of discussions with Islamic finance specialist houses, particularly in Kuwait, so I am well aware of their possible involvement in this area.
Against that background, we have to be careful—the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, drew attention to this—that Government-backed loans, if and when they are necessary, which is still open to question, do not increase the incentives for the private sector to deliver value for money by transferring risk away from the private provider to the public sector. We must ensure that there is no crowding out of private investors by the Government reducing competition and stepping in where there is not a market failure. For that reason, it is our policy for the Government to make loans only where they do not risk undermining the wider market, or where such loan or construction of a particular financial instrument helps to address a specific market failure. In that spirit, we will look to target the green investment bank—which will initially have £1 billion of government capital and the possibility of proceeds from government asset sales but will not have a mega balance sheet—on helping to relieve particularly challenging areas of risk on projects, particularly at the front end or where new technology is involved. We will come forward with the design of the green investment bank by spring 2011.
I turn briefly to the question of project failures and guarantees, which was raised several times. It is important to note that PPP, including PFI, critically allows us to transfer substantially more risks to our partners than conventional procurement. As has been said, we should not shy away from taking on challenging and complex projects. However, I absolutely take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that we need appropriate expertise in government when we come to such projects. At the moment, there is nothing on the scale and complexity of Metronet in the pipeline, but when we contemplate such projects, yes, we absolutely need the expertise. That is why it was absolutely right of the previous Government to centralise the expertise in Infrastructure UK as an infrastructure financing unit within the Treasury, especially given the particular circumstances of the past couple of years. My right honourable friend the Chancellor confirmed at the time of the Budget that Infrastructure UK remains central to how we take our efforts forward. That is the best answer that I can give to the question about expertise, which we recognise.
My noble friend Lord Newby picked up on a point in the national infrastructure plan about risk transfer and the possibility of reducing costs. I point him to one area discussed in the report, which is whether we can expand the use of the regulated asset-based model as a way of attributing risk in a different way and bringing down the cost of capital. That is very much work in hand.
On the question of preferred bidders, PPPs are now sufficiently complex contracts that they have to be procured under the so-called competitive dialogue procedure. This prohibits any discussion of the scope or cost of the contract with the preferred bidder and was designed to stop the so-called deal creep that has been seen in the past. The Treasury will publish a review of the competitive dialogue procedure—that addresses part of the point made by the noble Lord—later this month.
The committee's report also highlighted the value that private sector expertise and due diligence bring to PPP. In that context, one specific point that was drawn to our attention was bid costs. That issue has arisen again, particularly in the re-review of projects that we conducted following the election and ahead of the spending review. Although government policy remains that bid costs should not be paid unless in exceptional circumstances, the Treasury review of competitive dialogue—which, as I said, is scheduled for publication in November—will set out details of our review of policy in that area.
To wrap up, I emphasise that public/private partnerships, including PFI, will continue to make a valuable and important contribution to our future infrastructure needs. There are more than 670 signed PFI contracts, and the spending review confirmed further new projects, including three maintenance projects and the Nottingham tram extension. However, I think that we all agree that PPP should be used only where it offers real value for money. In pursuit of that objective, we have taken steps, as I have described, to improve how we assess those partnerships. We have removed the financial incentives that unfairly encouraged the use of PFI over other delivery structures. I mentioned the steps that we have taken to drive forward transparency. We have set out the broader challenges facing our infrastructure in the first national infrastructure plan, to which my noble friend Lord Newby drew attention.
In conclusion, the Government absolutely acknowledge the points raised in the Economic Affairs Committee report about both the benefits that private finance projects bring and the drawbacks of the current system. We will continue to look at options to improve the way PPPs perform, building on the work that we are already taking forward. In the current climate, there is a particular need to get the best possible deal for the taxpayer, and we are completely committed to that. I welcome the conclusion of the committee's report. I thank my noble friend Lord Vallance of Tummel and the other members of the committee for it. I absolutely take on board the valuable suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that it should be used as source material for training people in government.