The fantasy world of private finance for transport via public private partnerships

This section reviews the experience of the United Kingdom’s transport PPPs and the financial costs of different types of PPP. It concludes that rail PPPs have not generally been successful in delivering the outputs expected and that road PPPs are costly and as a result have reduced the overall physical volume of road investment. Using the private sector as a financial intermediary adds cost, complexity, bureaucracy and risk that public authorities are unable to overcome. This is reflected in the international as well as British experience. Although a project may fail to transfer risk and deliver value for money in the way anticipated, the scope for enforcement of conditions or dissolution of the partnership is in practice severely circumscribed for legal, operational and political reasons, with the result that public authorities find themselves locked into partnerships.