Mark Watts

Head Of Lighting on Matilda The Musical. West End Legend. Interests include movies, Dr Who and prog rock.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@iamleoaustin @AvantiWestCoast Thanks so much.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@AvantiWestCoast Can I use my Euston to Rugby ticket to travel from Marylebone to Leamington so I can taxi from there due to today’s troubles?

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@WestMidRailway Yes but I charge a £4.99 service charge for doing that so where do I send the invoice?

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@WestMidRailway Please fix your delay repay system! That’s twice in the last few weeks that it doesn’t recognise tickets bought from your app.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

This one will require a stiff drink.

In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI.

The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing.

It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary.

The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago.

And the terms are extraordinary.

PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses.

In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard.

The NHS has been hit hardest.

According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up.

In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors.

One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment.

Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build.

Now here's what makes this worse.

Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment.

So what actually happened?

The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape.

PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate.

Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done.

This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care.

There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

[Brian Merchant @bcmerchant]

When a teenaged Adam Raine turned to ChatGPT in deep depression, it urged him to kill himself, which he did, spurring a wrongful death suit. OpenAI responded by subpoenaing the guest list at his funeral.

[Neo @NeoWokio]

me trying to find the HDMI port on my TV

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@AWC_Help299 Finally left Euston 2.5 hours late!!!!! Avanti make it impossible to commute to London for work.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@AvantiWestCoast was booked on 22.30 from Euston to Rugby. So far 2 hours and 20 mins late. Any updates?

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

Would absolutely love it if my local @cinecinema was actually showing this film!

[Cineworld @cineworld]

REPOST FOR A CHANCE TO WIN 🔁

With Park Chan-wook's #NoOtherChoice out now at Cineworld, we're celebrating by giving away a No Other Choice merch pack! 🎬 To enter, just repost.

T&Cs apply: https://t.co/7n0PtZpy7N
Enter by 23:59, 02/02/26.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@cineworld Very tempting to cancel my Unlimited subscription.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

So @cineworld in Rugby has been showing trailers for No Other Choice, which I can’t wait to see. It’s out this week and now it turns out @cineworld aren’t showing it! How does that work?

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

Couldn’t see Frankenstein by @RealGDT or the new Knives Out by @rianjohnson in my local cinema. These @netflix deals are rubbish if you actually love movies and want to see them on the big screen. Hope it’s not true that Netflix have now bought Warner Brothers.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@BriAnimator_ Both GREAT films!

[Ava-Santina @AvaSantina]

Time to stop using @WeTransfer who from 8th August have decided they'll own anything you transfer to power AI

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@baileylikemovie 12 Angry Men.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

After last nights debacle - 2 hr delay - @AvantiWestCoast are once again nailing it as we sit at Euston delayed with no info!

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

@HDMOVIESOURCE Shawshank as I saw JP in cinemas first time around.

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

How do I make an official complaint about @AvantiWestCoast staff members?

[Mark Watts @Sparkywatts2000]

Staff at @NetworkRailEUS outright lying to customers. Just told me there has never been a 22.03 to Rugby (I’ve got it many nights for years). Please @AvantiWestCoast stop your staff lying to customers. It’s extremely disrespectful.