Private Finance Initiative

Debate between Michael Fallon and Jesse Norman

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jesse Norman]

I shall be talking about the early history of the PFI shortly. As my hon. Friend implies, the Ryrie rules were an important part of the fiscal stringency that surrounded that project. What the issue of the Dartford crossing brings out is that PFI is often successful on these economic infrastructure projects and less effective on social infrastructure projects.

[Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

While my hon. Friend is on the subject of a voluntary rebate, is he aware of the research from the university of Adelaide showing that the average profit made when PFI equity on hospital projects is sold on was more than 66%. Is it not the case that we should be looking at something more than voluntary?

[Jesse Norman]

At this point, I want to keep the rebate voluntary because we are making good progress, but many Members feel that something more stringent would be appropriate. In the assessment of the profits on these equity stakes, I would caution that in some cases those equity stakes have been built up over a considerable period and one should not necessarily look at just the headline number if it is the result of a 10 or 15-year investment.

I have spoken about the campaign that we have run so far. An important feature of the rebate campaign is that at least part of any savings would remain with the public service involved. The result, therefore, would be a win not merely for the taxpayer but for local communities, which could potentially benefit from many millions of pounds in savings over the next two decades.

Let me make it clear that I am not for one moment suggesting that existing PFI contracts should be torn up, but contracts are routinely renegotiated in the private sector. The rebate would be a voluntary one, and not a haircut imposed by Government. There is a valid precedent in the code of conduct that was signed in 2002, by which the contractors agreed to share windfall refinancing gains with the taxpayer. It may be that that code of conduct needs to be further extended to the secondary market trading of equities.

What I did not expect was the level of support that I and colleagues have received from key players in the PFI industry itself. They know that something is wrong. They are aware of public concern, and they want to participate in the next generation of economic infrastructure. Having started as a solo mission, the campaign has become a cross-party movement of more than 70 Members of Parliament. We have sat down with many large PFI companies and talked in detail about the scope for savings.

Parliamentary concern about the costs of the PFI has resulted in an inquiry by the Treasury Committee and, to their huge credit, the Government are taking the idea of a rebate very seriously indeed. Ministers at every level have made clear their desire to see savings. The Cabinet Office has been looking closely at the PFI in its quest for greater efficiency across the public sector; the Ministry of Defence has announced that it is reopening three major contracts as part of its own renegotiation strategy; and the Treasury has opened discussions with the PFI industry about a new code of conduct and it has recently concluded a “deep dive” investigation of the PFI contract at the Queen’s hospital in Romford. That is the first time in 15 years that a Government have taken a forensic look at a specific PFI contract, and it sends out a clear signal of intent to dozens of other PFI projects. So we are making progress. That is the context for this debate—the first Parliamentary debate on the PFI—and I hope that colleagues from all parties will make their support loud and clear for these actions for better public services and real savings for the taxpayer.

However, to understand the present we must understand the past. How did we get to such a sorry state of affairs with the PFI? The history is surprising and damning by turns. It can be divided into three phrases: experiment; ramp-up; and standstill. The PFI was introduced in 1992 from Australia by the Major Government, which was interested in how private capital and expertise could be used to support the public services. Labour Members often deride the Conservatives for introducing the PFI, but the facts tell a very different story. The Major Government could not make the PFI work. They insisted on judging each deal on its merits, having inherited a structure from the Ryrie rules, and the merits were sometimes very thin indeed. By 1996, barely £6 billion worth of PFIs had been approved and no PFI hospitals had been approved, let alone built.

Meanwhile, Labour was split. Old Labourites denounced the PFI in traditional terms as “creeping privatisation”, but it is often forgotten that the new Labour position was the exact opposite of that. New Labour thought that the PFI was a good thing and that the problem was that the Tories had not gone ahead with it fast enough. In a speech in Parliament on 28 November 1995, Tony Blair rammed that point home repeatedly. His position was perfectly clear:

“The PFI is right in principle. We have supported it, and in many ways we have been advocating it.”

At that point, John Prescott, who is now Lord Prescott, helpfully intervened with, “We initiated it.” Blair continued:

“It should not be manipulated to cook the books of public finance.”—[Official Report, 28 November 1995; Vol. 267, c. 1077.]

On that point at least, the future Prime Minister and his Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), were agreed, since the right hon. Gentleman also remarked in the early 1990s that

“PFI is a cynical distortion of the public accounts.”

How are the mighty fallen, and in what disgrace. We are accustomed to make fun of Lord Prescott—rightly so—but at that point he spoke truer than he knew. In many ways, Labour was in fact the real originator of the PFI in its current form. In 1997, the new Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and his then adviser, the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), were tied down by the promise that Labour had made to stick to Conservative spending plans for two years. They had committed to keep public sector net debt below 40% of GDP, according to their sustainable investment rule, but they were desperate to leave a legacy by building a huge amount of public infrastructure. They quickly spotted that PFI projects offered a way out of that quandary, because PFI liabilities could be treated as off-balance sheet and so they would never appear formally within the net debt numbers. Of course, as we now know, they later fudged the sustainable investment rule by redefining the economic cycle and then the rule was blown apart as the financial crisis took hold.

After the 1997 election, the new Paymaster General, the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson), summarily fired Alastair Ross Goobey, the chair of the PFI panel and a man with an impeccable record of protecting shareholder value, and ramped up the PFI dramatically. Over time, an unholy alliance developed between the Labour Government and the PFI companies. PFI became the “only game in town”, as more and more projects were pushed in its direction by Government Departments that were desperate for capital spend but prevented by central Government from looking at alternatives.

That ramp-up was aided by the introduction of PFI credits, which allowed Departments to avoid running local authority PFI spend through their own budgets, thus evading responsibility for them; it was also aided by the use of high official project discount rates, which artificially privileged the PFI over other forms of procurement; and it was also aided by the unwillingness of both the Blair and Brown Governments to permit debate on the issue, conduct any overall analysis of the PFI’s cost-effectiveness or gather the full data on primary and secondary transactions, which would have allowed proper transparency and proper public accountability. Frankly, that was disgraceful behaviour.

Fast forward to today and what do we find? More than 800 PFI projects are now in place, covering every imaginable form of public infrastructure from hospitals and schools to roads and military hardware. Nearly £70 billion—not £6 billion, as was the case in 1997—of capital commitments have been made, with a total liability to the taxpayer of well over £200 billion. And—irony of ironies—new accountancy rules are in place that require PFI debt to appear in the national accounts after all. The Balls-Brown attempt to fix the books has proven to be a failure, and a costly failure to boot.

It is important to say that many PFI projects have been completed on time and within budget. There is a mixed picture. Contractors such as Jarvis have gone bust when projects failed, or taken huge financial hits. Also, conventional procurement itself has not always covered itself in glory, as demonstrated by the Eurofighter, Wembley stadium and British Library projects.

In response, it is easy to highlight the many PFI projects that have been horrendously overpriced. They range from huge deals, such as the Airtanker contract, which is now estimated to cost £1.5 billion too much, and the M25 widening, which is now estimated to cost £1 billion too much, to tiny but telling details about smaller schemes, such as the kennels at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray, which cost more per night than rooms at the London Hilton.

An even more telling criticism emerges if we look at the overall record on the PFI. We now know that there is no general evidence that the PFI is cost-effective, or that the PFI improves the quality of buildings. Average annual maintenance costs are higher in PFI hospitals than in non-PFI hospitals. The most detailed study of PFI hospitals demonstrates that there is a large element of excess return to both debt and equity holders. Indeed, for equity holders the financial returns have been on occasion up to six times higher than the risk would justify.

There have been important secondary effects. The ramp-up of PFI projects helped to create an artificial boom in construction, which pushed up costs and over-extended the construction industry. Within the NHS, it has resulted in a huge and inflexibly designed Maginot line of hospitals, each one on inflation-adjusted contracts lasting decades, at a time when health care is moving towards more flexible models that combine specialist institutions with health and social care nearer to the home.