Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex".
If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.
This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.
PFI has been an absolute disaster in Scotland: not only incredibly expensive, but there were some substandard construction issues that became very public when a wall in a school simply fell over (fortunately outside hours so no injuries!)
That has happened in Britain. it was how Gordon Brown claimed a balanced budget while running up what would be classified as off balance sheet debt if anyone other than the government did it. A lot of things like hospitals were financed this way.
I would say the motive here was mostly to avoid increasing the government debt numbers. it would not work if the government did not exempt itself form the rules applied to everyone else.
This isn't really true, running things in the government also cost a huge amount of opex. Sure you do get one time payment and the resulting company will have to be hired but it will usually also have to start to compete. This could potentially result in more or less opex.
Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.
Well, the brits eventually decided against it after a thorough investigation found it to be a waste of money - "a January 2018 report by the National Audit Office found that the UK had incurred many billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#End...
Another antifeature is the lack of transparency. The costs and operations of the private company aren't public, which means the public doesn't know if the quality problems are due to skimping on costs or mismanagement etc and don't get the feedback necessary for decisionmaking for subsequent contracts.
Regarding your airline analogy: my criticism wasn't about the private sector, my criticism was about copying it (poorly) in the public sector. There's things to criticise in the private sector side accounting incentives as well but it's a different kettle of fish.
Britain is also uniquely bad at government contracting. As we can see in detailed studies about cost of transport engineering.
As with everything things can be done well and can be done badly. And it really depends on this exact situation and the exact contract.
And both well done likely not that different in cost and other factors need to be included.
In terms of transparency having an isolated outside of government structure, you can potentially be more transparent as you can get detailed contracts down to item levels and have all those things be public. This is done in other nations when it comes to transport projects. But it of course depends on the government writing the contract to demand the level of transparency.
If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.
This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.