PFI is not bad news - 20.10.05
contractjournal.com Newsletter - 20.10.05
PFI is not all bad news
The unions are not the biggest fans of PFI, but it can deliver good news for the industry on occasions. CJ news editor Justin Stanton defends its case.
This week’s rumpus over Birmingham City Council’s (BCC) £2.2bn road maintenance PFI deal is yet another example of how relatively easy it is for unions to garner bad press for PFI in the national media.
TUPE rules on the transfer of public sector staff to the private sector are quite clear and should be sufficient to qualm any fears Amicus has for its members currently employed by BCC - if that really is why Amicus is complaining.
Indeed, one of the stories that emerged when Railtrack started to bring maintenance back in-house was that those engineers who had been in the public sector and then transferred to the private sector during the era of privatisation were in no mood to be transferred back to the public sector, where the terms and conditions were not as healthy as those they had got used to enjoying in the private sector.
Bidders for the BCC deal feel Amicus’s stance is more about retaining members. There is a marked trend for workers transferred from the public to private sector to allow their union membership to lapse. The more members a union has, the greater its political clout.
Since the inception of PFI, most unions have been against it both on the intellectual political ground (of transferring control of ‘saintly and sacred’ public services to the ‘evil, profiteering’ private businesses) and also because of the fear of losing members and therefore their real political power.
Of course one has to recognise that ‘bad’ news will always be more attractive than ‘good’ news. But where would the Labour government be without PFI and all the hospitals, roads and prisons that have been built as a result?
Nevertheless, it’s worth highlighting successes, particularly for PFI. One such is the N4 Kilcock-Kinnegad road deal in the Republic of Ireland . Awarded to the EuroLink consortium of SIAC Construction and Ferrovial subsidiary Cintra in March 2003, the project was due to complete in October 2006; almost miraculously it is now scheduled to open in December, fully ten months early!
’Owzat?!