Skip to main content

PFI Costs £21 per square foot excluding land

At the District Committee last week we were presented with the case that to have a community space of 3,300 square feet available from 8am to 6pm could cost 71,000 per year for 30 years.

Given that we need access during the evening this is a complete non-starter. The point to remember with this is that it ignores the land values. You could argue the case that the community were being priced out. That may be true, but everything I see about PFI is massively expensive (and involves tying up the public purse strings for decades).

The Treasury like it because they claim it reduces the risk of the price going up. The point is that the price is put particularly high at the start and the administrative costs of setting the schemes up are massive. The game is to get the capital cost off the PSBR, but the cost of doing this is massive.

This has a list of PFI projects agreed by the government. The total value is £42 bn.

That ignores all the projects in the pipeline and does not tell us how much money is paid out per year for each one. There are basically too many vested interests behind PFI for it to get proper scrutiny from the government on a value for money basis.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin