Implementing a partnership agenda

The public sector traditionally has obtained new assets (roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, buildings, and so on) separately from the associated services. A partnership agenda offers a different approach because the acquisition of infrastructure assets and associated services is accomplished with one long-term contract. Due to this bundling, before the contract can be put out to tender, decisions need to be made up front about who is responsible for what, and what to include or leave out: Services. What are the ‘core’ services that must be delivered by the facility? What are the non-core services? Finance. Who is best positioned to provide the finance? How quickly and at what cost could private finance be raised? Would it be quicker and less costly for the government itself to undertake the financing? Risks. What are the project risks? Which ones should be transferred contractually to the private party, or retained by the public sector or shared? How is uncertainty to be handled? Public interest. Are the public likely to get good value for money from the PPP? Do the outcomes satisfy the public interest test? These questions frame the content of the chapter along with some issues that have surfaced recently, namely commissioning and contestability, evidence on value for money, the relative cost of government and private finance, prompted by the argument that suppliers of private finance have greater, not less, ability to diversify risks than taxpayers.