Douglas Carswell's Blog

Who left the taps running?

One way Gordon Brown was able to max out the nation’s credit card was by spending an awful lot on PFI, or Private Finance Initiative.

PFI is a ministerial equivalent of a store card. Instead having to paying for new schools, hospitals or warships by handing over cash, PFI means that ministers sign a deal with big businesses to provide certain goodies, in return for the contractors being able to lay claim to a large slice of future tax revenue.  Those future voters who might be expected to pay for it all do not come into the equation.

Able to run riot with this new spending wheeze, in less than two decades ministers managed to run up over £200 Billion PFI debts. A great deal of tomorrow was spent yesterday.

Surely, you might think, ministers wanting to restore some sanity to our public finances would turn the tap off sharpish? With enough PFI debt to contend with, you would hope that we were not running up new ones.

Today I learn that since May 2010, 41 new PFI deals have been signed off with a capital value of £3.2 billion. If the tap is no longer gushing, it seems a pretty big dribble.

Perhaps Treasury officials really do believe that PFI provides the economy with a useful demand stimulus. If we have left the PFI taps running as a form of extortionately expensive Keynesian demand management, I think we should at least be told ....... 

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