https://common-wealth.co.uk/Public-common-partnerships.html
― ogmor, Monday, 1 July 2019 15:32 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i need to read it a bit more closely. the first part is a handy look at the follies of PFIs. I'm less clear about PCPs as a solution. The point about 'value for money' being driven by negative externalities is an important one. It seems feasible on a local level, with a shared community of interest (where it seems to be working in Preston) and where there's a good possibility of making a surplus (some of the energy examples cited). In the former case, it's helping a community starved of cash. In the latter, it's a standard co-operative business model afaict.
(I should say, my preferred model would be to see more regional financial and political devolution. local politics corrupt in many places of course, but equally a government putting in funding for potholes, or deciding whether trees can be cut down or not, is a) absurd b) leads to pork barrel politics and putting more power back into local politics may have an energising effect on local democracy. The nationalising turn by Labour is the thing I favour least about currently policy.)
The other crucial thing, pointed out here, and regularly missed, is that investment in public assets should be on the asset side, rather than the liability side. That latter alone would significantly change the investment logic for public infrastructure. (I'm surprised this isn't the case tbh - it seems like basic accounting?)
The two suggestions alone would require a sympathetic government. And although we have to assume a sympathetic government for anything like what the report suggests to be feasible on any sort of scale, it seems it would require a long term single-minded purpose to effect many of its most basic requirements.
I'm not at all clear from the report how the idea can reach any sort of scale outside of that requirement for a sympathetic government, too. One of the things that occurred to me when I first read the Chakrabortty piece on Preston was that while it was a welcome and positive story, things like improved transport links between somewhere like Preston and Manchester - increasing the ability of people locally to work in the nearest, biggest city, would be where you would want local investment to go, and that this, while welcome, was not a replacement for that.
For me the key questions are
- governance
- the raising of capital
- the requirement for surplus
- the scope
On the governance side, the need to balance out competing aims makes it look like a lot of stakeholder management, with the need for a decision-making framework and a clear vision. (It's about those values held in common - a local community of shared interest, like traders, yes, wider more complex requirements like education or health, less so?).
With the recommendation that surplus money gets invested in a general PCP pot, I'm not clear what the incentives are to invest in shares in a project. If the project is for you or represents your interests, then it may make sense to invest in order to accomplish the required end (a market, a road). It seems to me that this is where Preston has been succeeding (though it should be noted that an original enabling capital investment came from a George Soros fund).
Report points out that there will be a natural desire to reinvest capital in the supply and distribution chain verticals around them, but that this needs to be balanced out against "the wider project of socialist transformation". Again, there's a sort of handwave at 'negotiation' – negotiation is hard enough when there's a single public service actor, or a PFI RFP, I dread to think what it would be like in this situation. It seems unfeasible.
the requirement to generate a surplus makes it difficult to imagine many important infra and services projects taking place under this approach. report recommends starting with projects likely to generate a surplus energy, water, housing, and transport infrastructure - in order to kickstart what looks to me a rather optimistic image of cross-funding through surplus income. (that diagram seems wild to me - and more generally in the piece things get a bit vague, and the language gets quite bad, around the most optimistic scenarios.
I just had a quick look at the 2012 PFI info, and it will surprise no one to learn that the biggest spenders were health, education, transport and the MoD - oh and a massive wodge of PFIs in Scotland. of those it seems to be that only transport and defence have the potential to generate a surplus. but i feel I must be missing a central mechanism of how this is supposed to work. Clearly health and education are by far two of the biggest consumers of public finance. I can't see how this model would have been a replacement for standard state financing in those critical areas.
Interesting to see from that same report that 'Local Government and Communities' were also fairly big on PFIs - those projects seem to me to be ideal candidates for this model.
That leads to my final point on scope, which I've mentioned before, which is that this seems to work under some conditions, but I'm not convinced about the ability for it to become a model capable of delivering essential social goods. I would like to understand more on this point:
create commons where the conditions for a commons exist, but if not introduce democratic mechanisms to produce the conditions for commoning further down the line.
What are the conditions for commons? I may have missed it (i'm quite tired), but it would be good to see them listed.
As I say, feels feasible on a local level (though even there how you define a shared commons seems to me quite fraught outside the two examples of a limited set of shared interests - traders - or a sound business model - eg energy), but beyond that, I struggle a bit.
I feel I may be being unimaginative! as i say, I'd just like to see more state and local funding on the current models, and the investment in the public realm to be seen as the creation of assets, as well as having a positive social and financial impact on society. (ie, a good health service reduces the number of days lost through illness, good social care reduces pressure on police and hospitals, good education increases GDP etc etc ad infinitum, fuck the tories etc).
― Fizzles, Monday, 1 July 2019 21:47 (seven years ago)