KEEP PUBLIC SERVICES PUBLIC UNISON

Socialist Resistance pilot issue October 2002 | page 23

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

to come

The latest government figures show PFi payments this year totalling f4.5 bilion on the first round of schemes worth just £18 billion. But like the plumbing in a PFI hospital, with deals worth billions more in the pipeline, the flow of cash from public services into the coffers of banks and private industry is set to escalate into a flood

New schemes keep coming, despite these costs and the failures, because

managers, head teachers and others seeking new investment are painfully aware that whatever ministers may claim, PFl is effectively the only game in town". Only 3% of current investment in new hospitals is publicy funded.

But as public sector unions, driven on by the anger of their members at local level, raise the stakes, this could be an interesting trial of strength in the nearest New Labour has to a public policy-making event