Dan Milmo, Phillip Inman and Aziz Durrani

Somewhere in the bowels of the Treasury, a team of civil servants is giving one of Gordon Brown's most divisive policies a fundamental makeover. Without the existence of the newly created infrastructure finance unit, Manchester would have to do without a £635m waste disposal unit and the M25 would remain heavily congested. The Manchester scheme and the widening of the M25 motorway are private finance initiatives with a big problem: there is no private finance.

So last month the Treasury was forced to establish a unit whose remit replaces the "private" in PFI with "public". For long-standing critics of PFI, this bailout of £13bn worth of projects is the nadir of Brown's grand plan to protect the taxpayer from financial risk. Instead, taxpayers' money is being used by the government to subsidise the operation of many of the UK's largest PFI schemes.

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Posted by boyang at April 18, 2009 8:00 PM