"Hospitals built under the Private Finance Initiative could be a disaster", says the head of the government's own advisory board Sir Stuart Lipton. Whether patients recover or die makes no difference to the PFI contract to design and build. "There is not enough attention to detail, not enough care, not enough commitment."
'Workers at the UK's first hospital to be built under the controversial private finance initiative have voted in favour of industrial action.'
From 1979 on, the Thatcher counter-revolution pioneered the massive cut-price sale of public services from housing, water, power, education, healthcare, all the way to dustbins and street cleaning. Ex- (whoops! ­ New) Labour has taken the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) to heart and is trying to impose it on all public services. What this really means is a combination of taxes and private money, with private investors naturally skimming their cut off the top.
Under planned WTO regulations, once any private funding has been introduced into a public service, that service loses its protection and can be sold to the highest bidder. Nor is a government allowed to change its mind.
Council housing ­ the first target of Thatcherism ­ has been virtually exterminated by ex-Labour. Now ruled by housing associations, there is no pretence of any accountability. Meanwhile even housing co-ops are being forced to raise their rents to private sector levels. And most of us know someone who's been evicted because the Council takes months to sort out housing benefit.
But tenants and communities are fighting back. Tenants like those in Glasgow have so far successfully campaigned to stay in the public sector. And buildings are not only for housing. Just as developers take schools and turn them into loft living opportunities, we take empty buildings and put them to our own uses. And just as they take our nurseries and sell them for fortress housing for the rich, we reclaim them as community spaces.
Meanwhile ­ where not sold off ­ schools and hospitals are allowed to run down to justify yet more PFI projects. Old buildings are sold and new ones erected by private companies, leased back to the NHS over 30 years, and then the NHS gets the option to buy it! This accounting fiddle means it looks like less public money is being used; already NHS Trusts look more like market-driven businesses than public services. And there's talk of handing failing (i.e. multi-ethnic working class) schools over to companies like Sodexho (also running many UK prisons) and 3E's (named as a toadying nod to Tony B's 'education, education, education' soundbite). What will be their next 'it's not privatisation ­ honest!' scam..?
Every traveller is familiar with the killing fields of rail privatisation, nowhere more shockingly than at Paddington and Hatfield.
Even the business-loving politicians of Ex-Labour have given up on Railtrack, but still profess blind faith in the never-on-time train companies. But they are still planning the same chaotic break-up of services on London Underground, regardless of what the users want.
Of course the media (and most rabidly the London Evening Standard) are going to say principled strikes about safety and working conditions are just the actions of greedy, lazy workers ­ that's their job. They don't want us to recognise that increased profits for companies like Balfour Beatty and their ilk always mean lay-offs, delays and sometimes even death. And they certainly don't want workers and users standing together, or alliances like that of London Reclaim the Streets and tubeworkers.
Finally there are all those day-to-day services like street cleaning. Here privatisation has become synonymous with cheap labour, huge workloads, crap services and the kind of chaos that frequently ends up with councils sacking the contracting firms. And here too there are still fierce and sometimes successful struggles to return services to the public sector.

BBC link here and here.

A new quality service for our most valued customers
London Underground is pleased to announce a new level of service for our most valued customers. We are now piloting a new Business Class service. If you are entitled to this service, you know who you are. We know you as one of the movers and shakers who make London not just a capital city but a vibrant centre of capital. Some of you will make the Public Private Partnership work for yourselves and your shareholders. We're making the Tube work for you too.

What will it mean?
You know the problems with the Tube. Decades of under-funding by government have left stations crumbling and trains unreliable. But above all the problem facing you, our special customers, is overcrowding. And the people you get crowded with.
The Public Private Partnership will bring all the flair and social consciousness of corporations to bear on the task of running trains on time and safely whenever this is profitable. Corporations like Bechtel, famous for its safety record in running nuclear plants, and Balfour Beatty, which has never bribed government officials nor conspired to wipe out the centre of Kurdish culture. Corporations that will brook no nonsense from trades unions about outdated safety rules or working hours.
This will take time. So we're solving your biggest problem now. We want to bring you, our really important customers, back to the Tube. So we're giving you your own carriages - Business Class Tube.

What next?
Over time, we will introduce new features to Business Class Tube. Your carriages will be carpeted. In our long-term vision, attendants will serve complimentary refreshments to you in your club-style armchair seat. The Business Class section of station platforms will be patrolled to ensure that you are not inconvenienced by meeting common people. We will introduce special direct-to-platform lifts at the stations you use most.
We may at some point need to increase Business Class fares as these improvements come on line. But, in the spirit of the Public Private Partnership, we will finance their introduction by making savings elsewhere. We will for example take the seats out of Cattle Class carriages so they can be cleaned with high-pressure hoses once a month. Look at where those people live: will they mind? And who listens to them anyway?
Some of them may start talking to each other. Some may take the day off work and occupy trains. Some may hold Tube Parties spontaneously demanding the return of an unprofitably safe and accountable public service.

Welcome to your Tube!
But if we can get the public to hand their Tube over to you, you will no longer face the nightmare of being squashed with the unwashed!
www.new-tube.co.uk

Locked-in Profits
Private prison building is one of several projects being run under the Government's Private Finance Initiative (PFI). The current prison system in the UK is imported from America, one of the few countries with a higher proportion of its population behind bars than the UK. Many of the same companies are involved. These companies are paid per inmate per day, so the more people are locked up, the more money they make. Private prisons hold people for longer than state prisons, fund right-wing 'law and order' politicians and lobby the Government for harsher sentences.
In the UK more people are being sent to prison and sentences are getting longer. The prison population has been rising since 1993, when it was 45,000, to its current figure of around 65,000. At the same time, a massive prison building programme is underway involving three prisons currently under construction, three more planned, and extensions to existing prisons.
The Government has estimated that the most recent draconian legislation, for example, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, will cause the prison population to rise to between up to 80,000 by 2007. In January 2000, Prison Privatisation Report International noted that "[the Crime and Disorder Act] could create the need for more prisons. Since all new prisons in England and Wales are to be privately financed, designed, built and run this could allay the private sector's fears about future prison contracts."
One of the largest growth areas in the private incarceration business is the banging up of asylum seekers. Home Secretary Blunkett announced in October 2001 a whole new raft of measures on asylum seekers, including many 'mini-Oakington' detention (or is it 'reception'?) centres. Thus another privatised industry benefits from the inevitable by-product of another dirty war: fleeing human beings.