Middlesbrough Council - News Forum - Setting a light to the News

Just imagine the outcry if new schools, built with taxpayers’ money, were found to have no light switches so that lights were left on 24 hours a day all year round, or had windows that don’t open so that classrooms were often stuffy.
A Panorama investigation discovered two Yorkshire schools in such a state, yet when questions were asked about why they were built this way or when the faults might be fixed, they were met with a wall of silence.
Why? Because the schools were built using private funds as a result of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), the scheme under which private companies build projects such as schools and hospitals then lease them back to the state. In England, the financial agreements behind which PFI companies make their billions — and believe me, it will be billions — are exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds of maintaining commercial confidentiality.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... z1f1ZDuig4

As I recall, PFI began life under the Tories in the 1980's, and on the face of it there are advantages - let the supplier pay for the service, and rake back the profit in the years which follow with maintenance agreements which are guaranteed years in advance. However, as reported in the article, PFI can be dangerous and giving Labour control over something like that was always going to have similar results to letting an uncontrolled child run loose in Toys'r'us. Labour know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
- Fred, Basingstoke, 28/11/2011 8:00
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... z1f1ansYVp