PFI comes to the private sector

There are two things about PFI that everyone agrees with. In principle, it offers huge opportunities. In practice, it's hard graft making decent money out of it.

Of course, there is a raft of opportunities, but the bidding costs are high and the machinery of public sector decision-making has a habit of grinding slowly. Very slowly.

Bucknall Group, it seems, has come up with a new ruse to get around all this: try PFI with the private sector, they know a good deal when they see one. Innovation? It's their middle name. Bucknall - and its new backer, Citex - is so confident about the prospect it is implementing a bold plan to take the company off the stock exchange and paying a 73 per cent premium to shareholders to boot.

Bucknall's idea is to run the property holdings of FTSE 100 companies who don't want the hassle. These blue chip plcs will transfer their property holdings to a new company, which will be jointly owned by themselves and Bucknall.

The end result will be that Bucknall becomes a surrogate client, taking over responsibility of managing the existing property, maintaining it and building new factilities to meet its partner's needs.

No less a company than NatWest has considered such arrangements (though not with Bucknall). And while it passed them over, the Construction Clients' Forum reports clear interest from several building owners who would probably be termed lay clients.

The need for such expertise was foreseen in the Latham report. Sir Michael called for a new breed of adviser to hold clients' hands in the procurement process.

This move could be a sign that it is at last happening - albeit on a far broader, risk sharing basis that Sir Michael ever dreamed.