Private Finance Initiative

Mark Garnier Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak under one’s chairmanship, Mrs Main. [Laughter.] I also add my name to the chorus of congratulations for my near neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), who has not only secured this debate but worked so hard on the thorny issue of the PFI. His work includes his PFI rebate campaign, which I have enthusiastically signed up to. He has also managed to secure a Treasury Committee investigation into the future of PFI. It is good to see that four members of the Select Committee have come along this afternoon.

The PFI does not directly affect my constituency—there is only a magistrates court there under a PFI contract. However, it indirectly affects my constituents because they are served by the Worcestershire Royal hospital. Famously, Kidderminster hospital was downscaled to help pay for it. When my constituents hear that we have overspent on those contracts to the tune of half a billion pounds, they will be rightly even more furious than they were when the Government wound down Kidderminster hospital.

The PFI is something that we all love to hate. It has come to signify the inability of the public sector to write proper contracts and it is a symbol of trying to hide capital investments on the country’s balance sheet. However, is that a fair summary of what is a reasonably legitimate way of financing part of the supply side of the economy? I have certainly argued in the past that the public sector will always negotiate bad contracts for the simple reason that there is an asymmetry in negotiating skills. I am certainly not here to criticise the knowledge of public sector employees in terms of how to go about writing a contract. However, when it comes to a contract between the public sector and the private sector, we have, on one side of the table, a well-read and well-intentioned civil servant who is doing his best and possibly looking forward to his retirement, while on the other side we have a hardened businessman who is motivated by profit and return on equity and quite probably incentivised by direct equity in his business and a bonus for concessions won. A civil servant will certainly be very well educated in negotiating, but the hardened PFI negotiator from the private sector will have the concept of return on equity, risk evaluation and profitability etched into his DNA. There is no doubt that there is plenty of money to be made out of PFI for the astute negotiator.

Dexter Whitfield, director of the European services strategy unit, in his submission to the recent Treasury Committee investigation, highlighted the profitability of PFI equity sales—that is where a PFI contract is sold and the profit made is in addition to the profit that is gained on an ongoing basis. He pointed out that although there is little readily available information on PFI sales, the ESSU database holds 63 transactions covering 154 PFI projects, and he has looked at how much they have made. Average equity profit has been 50.6% on the 63 transactions. What is interesting is how they fare by sector. Health has been given a profit of 66%, housing 80% and leisure 86%. However, the truly eye-watering winner by miles goes to the defence sector, which has been giving PFI providers a whopping 134% profit on their equity sales. The Treasury Committee inquiry was lucky enough to have a representative from the PFI industry, one of the directors of Balfour Beatty, and he was surprisingly evasive in his reply to my questions, implying that that profit may have included the annual premium returns and therefore was not a fair judgment. But my interpretation is that PFI providers that have sold their investments have already made an annual return on the projects—that is perfectly reasonable, given the way that the projects are structured—but that the sale profit is in addition to that annual return.

What does that mean in terms of the contracts that have been negotiated? It seems that the valuation of risk, which is a key part of a contract, has been miscalculated in favour of the provider and it is that premium, in favour of the provider, that gives the opportunity for the sizeable equity sale profit. Indeed, the fact that there is someone out there to buy the equity stake with their own measure of risk and expectation of return means that there is still more to be made by the subsequent buyer, implying even further mispricing of risk.

That is the point. PFI projects do two things: first, they provide a so-called off-balance sheet way of financing a vital piece of investment; and secondly, they devolve the risk element of any project to the private sector. But the private sector will evaluate that risk and charge for it, and the evidence put forward by Mr Whitfield suggests that the PFI provider is making a great deal of that opportunity.

[David Mowat]

I have been listening very closely this afternoon to the points that have been made about the super-profits, the 180% margins and all the rest of it. I have also tried to hear the names of the companies that are making those profits and the only two that I have heard are Balfour Beatty and Bovis. My understanding is that neither of those organisations has a particularly high return on capital employed. So I am a little bit mystified as to where the money is going and I genuinely would like somebody to help me with that point.

[Mark Garnier]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention—what a perfect opportunity for me to do so. These are the profits of equity sales by the companies concerned: 41% for Carillion; 59.1% for John Laing; 53.9% for Interserve; 78% for Lend Lease Corporation, so well done to that company; 42.9% for Costain Group; 20% for Serco Group, which was perhaps not the best investment for someone’s money; 71% for Balfour Beatty; and 59% for Kajima Partnership.

[David Mowat]

What are those numbers?

[Mark Garnier]

Those are the equity sale profits. So those companies are PFI providers who have then sold their contracts, and those figures are the profits they have made. Just to be fair, the figure was 56.3% for Kier Group. Those are pretty sizeable returns.

[Jesse Norman]

It is very important to distinguish two things. One is the internal rate of return, or IRR, of an investment, which is the annual amount by which it gets upgraded; the second is the value that a provider gets when it sells a share. We do not know the answer to this question, but those values are perhaps what they are in part because of the period of time that they have been held. If someone held a share in the London stock market for 10 years, they would see a certain uplift in its value. I do not know what the number is, but it might be 20%, 30% or 40%. It is that kind of thing. The contrast is with the returns that were being made, for example, with the Norfolk and Norwich university hospital, where the refinancing, which loaded up the hospital with £100 million of additional debt, realised an IRR—an annual upgrade in the return to the investors—of 60%. So what my hon. Friend is talking about might be, in fact, a 7% or 8% return each year. We just do not know, and that in itself is a great embarrassment for the previous Government, because we do not have the numbers.

[Mark Garnier]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. I suspect that what these numbers are telling us is that the annual returns are being treated rather like the dividends on an equity investment in the stock market and these capital returns—the sales of equities—are the capital return that the company gets. So they are already getting their annual rate of return and this money is in addition to what they would expect to receive if they ran the contract to the end. But we need to clarify that, because these are incredibly important points.

The Government are committed to the PFI and, as we have already heard, they have 61 new projects being procured as of earlier this year, with a value of £7 billion. That is not necessarily a bad thing because money is being invested into the supply side of the economy, and we need that investment to support our expectations of economic growth and to sort out the financial mess that the coalition Government have inherited. The PFI allows that investment to happen without any immediate impact on measures of public sector capital expenditure or borrowing. However, the efficiency case for the PFI rests on the model’s ability to allocate risk more effectively than regular procurement. To date, there seems to be no empirical evidence to support any claims that the higher price of PFI finance has offset any reduction in costs.

The efficiency case looks even more fallacious in the light of falling interest rates, as we heard earlier in the debate. The Government can borrow directly at around 3.3% and yet the IRR on a PFI contract is now 4% higher than that. That is a significant risk premium to be paid by the Government, especially when the PFI investor frequently offloads risks on to subcontractors. We have heard that before. Given that we have very low interest rates and can issue gilts on a 25-year basis, should that not be one way to look at financing some of the supply side of the economy?

Coming away from the financial side, I am not sure that some of the users of PFI facilities are always that happy. Wyre Forest was one of the areas that suffered under the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme. I am continuing to work hard to get rebuilding finance for up to 11 of my local schools. We are waiting for the James review on that.

Wyre Forest secondary schools were to be built under PFI contracts. In private chats that I had with various head teachers and governors, they were concerned that a PFI contract would tie their hands financially, limiting their ability to determine their budgets and, therefore, investment in teaching and teachers. We all want new schools, but at what cost to education? PFI has a place in the future in terms of funding investment, but it has to be done at the right price. A lot more work needs to be done on ensuring that we get the end product at the right price. That is why I am incredibly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire, for taking the initiative to question this important area so closely, and to work so hard for the future of PFI.