Can the public learn to love PFI?

PFI is a policy the public has never loved. Launched in late 1992, it still bears the scars of a difficult birth. Its conception was a shabby affair in some smoke-filled back room in Whitehall, where it simply popped out as the least bad option to cope with a future funding shortage and an unacceptably high PSBR. Ministers, on the other hand, needed to present it as a 'planned' policy, conceived as a logical way to financing the nation's services.

As our report, Funding the Future shows (pages 20-31), this ragged child of the early nineties is, in many ways, starting to come good. Many of the concerns of PFI practitioners are abating. There is widespread activity across all sectors, growing standardisation of procurement methods and contracts, and a degree of scale that is allowing strategic alliances and solutions to emerge.

But while the practice of PFI may be getting better, the justification for it is as hazy as ever. From the outset, converts argued that it would produce better value for money, and opponents that it would erode public accountability. A decade later both cases can still be made. So we have a situation where the public tolerate PFI providing it has a low profile, and oppose it when it doesn't. They allow private money to whisk them through our operating theatres, but not our skies. They accept a privately 'run' M40, but not a privately run tube.

Despite technical advances, PFI is no nearer to the nation's heart. Ownership of assets is more blurred, accountability still indirect, and it is increasingly the province of powerful corporations not smaller firms. In London, this has led Government to an unhappy confrontation with voters. It must either win their hearts and minds, or beat a retreat.