2. How far are your reservations about PFI over the mechanism itself and how far is the problem that government funding levels and procedures have not adapted enough to the shift to private finance projects?
My reservations are about the mechanism itself. As Peter Dixon put it on the Guardian website on 13 November, 2009; "PFI is expensive and inflexible" and George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, was quoted in The Observer of 15 November 2009 as saying that PFI lacks transparency and fails to shift risk on to the private sector.
PFI promotion is the result of a deliberate lack of government funding. Government funding has been restricted as part of a political process to meeting a target for the level of National Debt (see question 3 below). However since the credit crunch, the absurd situation has arisen in which the government is itself lending to the private sector to complete PFI schemes (see paragraph 3.4 of the BMA evidence).