Private Finance Initiative and Public Private Partnerships: What Future for Public Services? plus PPPs - Partnership or Plunder?

Private Finance Initiative and Public Private Partnerships- What Future for Public Services?

Includes extracts from Public Services or Corporate Welfare: Rethinking the Nation State in the Global Economy by Dexter Whitfield (Pluto Press, 2001)

Published June 2001, 37 pages.

Contents

Introduction.

The origins of PFI/PPPs.

The basics of PFI/PPP.

The claimed rationale for PFI/PPP

What Labour did for PFI/PPPs

25 reasons to oppose PFI/PPP

  1. Reconfiguring services – PFI/PPP affects all staff and services

  2. PFI/PPPs are often more expensive than publicly financed projects

  3. Escalating project costs

  4. Whose value for money?

  5. PFI projects commit future governments to a stream of payments

  6. Affordability gap – cuts in other services

  7. PFI is subsidised by government

  8. High transaction costs

  9. Public sector comparator flawed

  10. Privatising the development process: selling land and assets

  11. Transforming the funding of capital expenditure

  12. Changing nature of risk

  13. Lack of democratic accountability

  14. Service failures

  15. Public sector lose control over assets and services

  16. Private sector dictating social and public needs

  17. Two tier workforce transforming the labour process

  18. Impact on in-house services

  19. Best Value

  20. Refinancing PFI/PPP projects

  21. New form of contractor organisation

  22. Loss of public interest

  23. Long procurement and negotiation process

  24. Shifting the balance between capital and the state

  25. A new age of corruption

Alternatives to PFI/PPP

Exporting PFI/PPP

Impact of the World Trade Organisations General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)

Public goods, private delivery

Corporate Welfare Complex

PPPs – Partnership or Plunder: Dexter Whitfield interviewed by Alex Doherty, New Left Project, March 2010

In a detailed interview Dexter Whitfield author of ‘Global Auction, of Public Assets’, describes the damaging effects of so-called Public Private Partnerships. He outlines why they are a disastrous way to provide essential services and he details a democratic alternative to PPPs.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/ppps_-_partnersh ip_or_plunder

This document was last modified on 2016-06-29 09:41:35.
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