The Economist (subscription required to read link) hits the nail on the head when it savages the government for using public private partnerships to conceal taxation.
“PFI deals are supposed to transfer risk from the public to the private sector. But with so much at stake politically, the government cannot afford to let them fail. One way or another, the railways have to work and the underground has to run. This makes it impossible genuinely to transfer risk from the public to the private sector, which undermines the purpose of PFI.
“If risk cannot genuinely be transferred, then the Treasury should own up to the actual cost of the borrowing that the private sector is undertaking on its behalf… Keeping risky investments off the books is the sort of thing that Enron did to its shareholders. It is not the sort of thing that governments should do to taxpayers. ”
The government should simply own up to the amount of money that fixing transport and health will require and raise taxes in order to pay for it.
