Geoffrey Spence, chief executive of Treasury body Infrastructure UK, is currently leading a review of the PFI financing model. This review, he said, might not have become necessary had civil servants been better at reviewing procurement decisions, and improving future contracts as a result.
Rather than waiting until full overhauls are required, he said, “a better way of taking a policy forward is always to look at where it could be improved and to try and achieve a process of incremental change.”
He continued: “I would suggest that if, over the last 20 years, we’d had a little more focus, on a more regular basis, on what has actually happened [during and after the procurement process] and what we can change to improve things, some of the issues that we’re having to address now would have been sorted out a long time ago.”
Civil servants are good at helping ministers make decisions using current information or predictions of future change, he said, but “we seem to forget about the past very quickly”.
Read the full interview with Geoffrey Spence