By Professor John Robertson

Deep into today’s BBC Northamptonshire, not BBC Scotland, of course, we read

The NHS is currently grappling with the detrimental effects of inefficient Public-Private Partnerships (PFI) introduced by New Labour, which are siphoning off essential funds from patient care.

How much?

From SNP Media, in March 2023:

From SNP Media today:

The price of the biggest scandal of the Devolution era – Scottish Labour’s PFI catastrophe – continues to increase after it was revealed the cost to the public purse ballooned by an extra £1million every week in just the last year alone.

In response to a question from Kenneth Gibson MSP, Deputy First Minister John Swinney confirmed that the amount the Scottish Government and local authorities must find to pay for the botched Scottish Labour initiative had increased from £1,410 million last year to £1,460 million this year.

Now, after many years of payments and 16 years after Scottish Labour were kicked out of government, the amount still owed under PFI for hospitals and schools which the public sector won’t even own after they have been paid for is still an eye-watering £15,460 million. That outstanding amount has increased by a staggering £770 million in a year.

In January 2009, as the SNP minority government found its feet:

By cuckooshoe

In the Scotsman 31 January 2009:

TEN thousand Scots schoolchildren are being educated in crumbling and condemned state schools that will not be rebuilt for many years because of chronic cash shortages.

As you can see from these two paragraphs, even then the (minority) SNP Scottish Government made the right call –

Major councils and teaching unions laid the blame for the crisis at the door of the Nationalist government, claiming its dogmatic refusal to accept private finance was consigning a generation of Scots children to miserable schooldays and sub-standard education.

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “The Scottish Futures Trust is already supporting infrastructure investment and will be used in the commissioning of a new school project in the spring. Local authorities are also able to build schools through traditional funding methods. In 2008, more than 30,000 pupils have swapped sub-standard classrooms for modern ones and over the lifetime of this parliament we will see that total rise to at least 100,000.””https://www.scotsman.com/news/scandal-of-scotlands-crumbling-schools-2472468

Then, in February 2023, the Herald put the £1.4 billion in the shade:

According to the Sunday Herald in 2016, because of Labour’s PFI scheme, the 80 projects completed between 1993 and 2006, will cost us ‘a massive £30 billion over the coming decades.’

Today, the Herald tells us, under one of their thousands of Nicola pics, that we are facing, due to PFS schemes, an ‘astonishing £8.5 billion bill’ for ‘over 50 schemes‘ (2007 to 2022?), to be ‘forked out in the next 26 years.’

Stop sniggering at Martin Williams’ ‘forked out.’

Clearly a precise comparison is not possible here but it does look as if the SNP schemes are a far better deal and that’s if we don’t take into account the risk of walls falling on schoolkids because Brian Wilson’s New Labour thought it was a good idea to exclude local authority building control officers and let the contractors supervise themselves.

Sources:

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14432710.30-billion-cost-labours-toxic-pfi-legacy-scotland/

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23347394.revealed-8-5bn-bill-2-9bn-scots-infrastructure-projects/

And the costs were not just monetary:

In the Observer January 28 2023:

Ministers sparked a furious row over the safety of thousands of dilapidated school buildings in England on Saturday night by abandoning the imminent publication of data showing those judged to be most at risk of collapse.

In its latest annual report, published in December, the DfE confirmed the crisis, saying “there is a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools which are at, or approaching, the end of their designed life-expectancy, and structural integrity is impaired”. It added that “the risk predominantly exists in those buildings built in the years 1945 to 1970 which used ‘system build’ light-frame techniques”.https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/29/tell-us-which-schools-could-collapse-labour-will-force-ministers-to-reveal-data

Readers may remember Scottish Labour’s performance on schools was problematic when their PFI schemes put local authority inspectors out of the loop leading to walls without cavity ties collapsing: 

A report into safety failures that forced 17 Edinburgh schools to close has highlighted a lack of proper scrutiny of the construction work.

The independent report has criticised the council and the partnership which managed the building contracts, as well as the construction company.

City of Edinburgh Council said lessons would be learned from the report.

Nine tonnes of masonry fell at Oxgangs Primary School in January 2016 during a storm.

Ten primaries, five secondaries and two additional support needs schools were shut because of concerns over the standard of construction in the city.

About 7,600 pupils were affected by the closures.

How Edinburgh built unsafe schools

City of Edinburgh Council asked John Cole, an experienced architect from Northern Ireland, to investigate the closure of the 17 Edinburgh schools built under the PPP1 project.

In his report, he said: “The fact that no injuries or fatalities to children resulted from the collapse of the gable wall at Oxgangs School was a matter of timing and luck.

“Approximately nine tonnes of masonry fell on an area where children could easily have been standing or passing through.

“One does not require much imagination to think of what the consequences might have been if it had happened an hour or so later.”

The 250-page report identified fundamental defects which led to the wall collapse:

• not enough wall ties
• the wrong type of ties were used
• wall cavities were not uniform.

The report said: “It is the view of the inquiry that the primary cause of the collapse of the wall at Oxgangs school was poor quality construction in the building of the wall, which failed to achieve the required minimum embedment of 50mm for the wall ties, particularly in the outer leaf of the cavity wall. The poor quality relates to all three of the following aspects:

• the direct laying of the bricks and the positioning of the wall ties
• the direct supervision of the laying of the bricks and the positioning of the wall ties
• the quality assurance processes used by the sub-contractor and main contractor to confirm the quality of the construction of the walls

“All three issues were ultimately the responsibility of the design and build contractor in charge of the site.”https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-38907714