The case for PFI essentially turns on whether it has achieved the beneficial outcomes it was meant to bring about:
• Focus on outputs/outcomes rather than inputs.
• More rigorous risk/cost analysis.
• Optimal allocation of risk.
• Synergies of integration of design/construction/operation/maintenance.
• Whole life costing.
• Comprehensive competition across all elements of projects.
• Long term performance management.
• Whole of contract maintenance, and hand-back, of the asset in contractually agreed condition.
PFI has also arguably had some unlooked for benefits, not envisaged when it was launched in the 1990s, including:
• Mobilising the sheer project execution ability of the private sector. Between May 1997 and July 2007, 123 Department of Health PFI schemes were approved, of which 69 were operational by the end of July 2007. These operational schemes had a combined value of £4.2bn. It is hard to imagine that this could have been achieved without the thorough-going involvement of the private sector implied by PFI. Only 21 comparable publicly funded schemes, approved in the same period, are operational.
• Innovation in banking and capital markets products. PFI projects are now routinely financed on terms which would have been inconceivable in the mid 1990s.
• Pump priming the development of equity infrastructure as an asset class is a potentially important means of giving pension providers, including some public sector pension funds, access to the long term assets they need to match their long term liabilities.