Private Finance Initiative

I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the important issue of the private finance initiative under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank the Minister, the Back Bench Business Committee, which allowed us to hold this debate, and my many colleagues in the Chamber today. Since its inception in the early 1990s, the private finance initiative has resulted in more than £200 billion of public debt, the cost of which will hang over the British taxpayer for decades. It has created great private fortunes and fundamentally shaped the nature of our public services. It has generated huge public outrage, as we will hear in this debate. It has raised profound issues of fairness between this generation and the next and it has affected virtually every constituency in the land and the lives of millions of people. For reasons that I will explain, the extraordinary fact is that until now there has never been a full three-hour debate on the PFI in this House. There has never been a comprehensive assessment by the Government of the cost and benefits of the PFI or a successful attempt to collect all of the relevant data about the PFI into one place. None the less, the topic of this debate could hardly be more relevant. We need to ask three questions. How did we get here? How can we make savings from the PFI for the taxpayer? How can we design a better system for the future?