Wordpower & SLR

Both Wordpower and Scottish Left Review have great new jazzy websites. Take a look.

The latest issue of SLR has a great article by Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, 'Lifting the Lid on PFI':

"The scale of PFI is huge. In Scotland alone, PFI deals in operation or signed cover capital expenditure of £5.1 billion, almost all under Labour. A further £1.7 billion future deals are in preparation. Serious concerns about PFI emerged very quickly. One concern, for example, was whether risk was actually transferred to the private sector. Yet another concern was with the scale of PFI projects: many projects are so large and complex that the degree of competition has been limited. But the major worries about PFI have related to cost. For example, it became clear that many new hospitals were having to be planned on the basis of reduced bed numbers, in order to make the forecast unitary charge payments affordable: (for example, to make the New Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh PFI scheme affordable, a 24 per cent reduction in acute bed numbers was required across the Lothian Health Board area.) Suspicions really started to crystallise when several PFI suppliers were able to extract large capital gains from their PFI projects, at an early stage in the life of the project, effectively by capitalising their anticipated future profit streams. In several cases, the capital gains extracted were several times the original inputs of capital by the PFI contractor." Full article here.