The key documents on the financial catastrophe visited upon the UK – and continuing to be visited upon the UK every day – by New Labour.
Private Finance Initiative – PFI – was a ‘structured finance’ scheme to raise new money via borrowings that did not appear in General Government Gross Debt or Public Sector Net Debt, and which will not appear in Labour’s new measure Public Sector Net Liabilities.
PFI was the financial mechanism for the financing of the great expansion of universities, of new schools, hospitals, facilities for the Ministry of Defence, as well as miscellaneous items like traffic lights.
The cost to the user – and therefore the cost to the taxpayer – of PFI was inflated by the cost of the debt (3% or 4% higher than the government’s cost of debt) as well as by the proportion of debt in the scheme, compared to equity: the schemes were highly leveraged.
Then came the servicing charges (e.g. new toilet seat – £75), and you end up with a running sore on the public finances which will only be healed in 2053.
By that time an initial capital expenditure of £50 billion – the initial expenditure on all the buildings and facilities – will have caused an outflow of £278 billion, of which £133 billion was still to be paid as of the date of the official inventory of projects in March 2023.
The ratio of initial expenditure to total cost is 5.56:1.
Two documents can be downloaded.
First we have the inventory of the projects that are still running, as of 31st March 2023.
Secondly we have the rationale and accounting for PFI as documented for the House of Commons in June 2008.