Would a Private Firm Ever Buy Anything with Something Like PFI?
It’s grim reading about the problems the NHS is facing over bloated PFI deals.
No-one with any sense would ever have locked themsaelves into such deals. I’m sure people like Tesco have probably used design, build and maintain for stores and depots, but they wouldn’t have ended up paying six times the cost of the building. They’d have also used standard designs to save building costs. I bet each hospital is very different.
The problem is not with PFI, but with the politicians, civil servants and administrators, who pushed these deal through. In a banana republic, I would be smelling the pungent smell of bungs, bribery and favours. But here it’s just bad economics and incompetence. And who was in charge of the country’s finance at the time? So add this to a list of his big mistakes, like pensions, banks, renewing Trident etc. Gordon Brown must rank as the worst Prime Minister any country in Europe has ever had. let lone the UK!
The Anonymous Widower 
When I was a school governor, PFI was really being pushed as a wonderful idea, and I know quite a few schools were built with PFI money. Then some years later, around the time I stopped being governor, I was hearing it wasnt the golden egg it had been billed as.
Comment by Liz P | August 13, 2010 |
There is an old true story about how Brunel and Florence Nightingale designed and then had built a prefabricated hospital for the Crimea in nine weeks. Not only that but they also laid down the principles of hospital design. Surely, all hospitals and schools these days should be built to standard, clever, efficient and beautiful designs to build them quickly and economically. I havce a feeling that sports grounds are now virtually done this way. Look at thyis new ground for Chesterfield, built in about a year for just £13,000,000
Comment by AnonW | August 14, 2010 |