jay

Manager of floors, CotF. MOT ALAW.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@aakashgupta Dystopian.

[Jonathan Slater @slater57649]

Using the whole store

[jay @jjayleeds]

@TheSquareBall Love how he’s complaining like he didn’t just assist Longstaff for the equaliser

[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.

[jay @jjayleeds]

Here are some of the reasons why this country is in such a mess. Outrageous waste of our taxes, no wonder people are angry.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

The British government has wasted more money on failed projects than some countries spend building their entire infrastructure.

After hearing about the cancellation of the Stonehenge Tunnel project, yet it still racking up £179 million in cost, I wanted to look at other projects and costs to see what the picture looks like this century.

Every number here comes from official reports, the National Audit Office, parliamentary committees, and ministers' own admissions.

Let me show you where your money has gone.

HS2 was sold to the country as a £37.5 billion high speed rail network connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The first phase was supposed to open this year. In 2026.

Here's where it actually is.

After six years of construction and £46 billion spent, tunnels have been bored, earth has been moved, viaducts have been built. But there is no railway. Not a single metre of track. The legs to Manchester and Leeds have been cancelled entirely. What's left is a line from London to Birmingham with no confirmed opening date, no confirmed final cost, and estimates so unstable that Parliament's own Public Accounts Committee has warned the cash cost of Phase 1 alone could reach £80 billion. Some industry forecasts put it above £100 billion.

The Transport Secretary stood in Parliament last year and called it "an appalling mess." She said billions had been wasted on scope changes, ineffective contracts, and bad management. Fraud allegations have since emerged in the supply chain.

Three times the original price. A fraction of what was promised. And still years from completion.

But HS2 is just one example.

The NHS National Programme for IT was supposed to create a unified electronic health record for every patient in England. Launched in 2002 with a budget of £6 billion. Abandoned in 2011 with the Public Accounts Committee putting the expected cost at £12.4 billion. It delivered a fraction of its promised benefits. Only 13 out of 169 hospital trusts received the systems they were meant to get. Then one of the contractors sued the government and won a settlement of nearly half a billion pounds. On top.

During Covid, the government threw billions out the door with almost no checks. The Covid Counter Fraud Commissioner's final report, published December 2025, found that fraud and error across pandemic support schemes cost taxpayers £10.9 billion. How much has been recovered? £1.8 billion. The Commissioner's words, not mine. The previous government "left the front door open to fraud." Bounce Back Loans were rolled out in under two weeks with no independent verification. PPE contracts were handed to companies with no track record. Defective gowns, masks, and visors weren't inspected for two years. By the time anyone checked, the money was gone.

Universal Credit was supposed to simplify the benefits system. The original programme was budgeted at around £2 billion. The National Audit Office has flagged massive overruns repeatedly as the project ballooned in scope and complexity. Total costs have run many times higher than planned. Nobody was fired.

The smart meter rollout was supposed to be finished by 2020. It wasn't. Costs have hit £13.5 billion. The programme has been dogged by meters losing functionality, missed deadlines, and a failure to deliver the energy savings that justified the whole thing in the first place.

One many of you will be familiar with. The Post Office spent £600 million on a computer system called Horizon. It was fundamentally flawed. Its defects led to more than 900 wrongful convictions. Sub-postmasters lost their homes. Their businesses. Their families. At least 13 people took their own lives. Compensation has now reached £1.4 billion and is expected to hit £2 billion. Fujitsu, the company that built the system, has not paid a single penny toward that bill. It is still collecting government contracts.

The Fire Control project. £469 million. Seven years. An attempt to modernise fire service control rooms. Scrapped. Nothing delivered. What a waste.

The electronic tagging programme. Five years late. Tens of millions spent. Abandoned. They ended up buying off the shelf tags that could have been bought for a fraction of the price years earlier.

The Garden Bridge. £53 million of public money. Not a single piece was built. You might ask what £53 million was spent on exactly.

The Rwanda deportation scheme. £715 million. Four people went voluntarily. Not a single forced deportation was carried out. Then the whole thing was scrapped.

Now here's the part that ties it all together.

In 2019, the Prime Minister's own Implementation Unit looked at the government's £432 billion portfolio of major projects. Only 8% had proper plans to evaluate whether they were working. 64% of that spending, £276 billion, had no evaluation at all. None. The government was spending hundreds of billions of your money with no way of knowing if any of it was delivering.

The National Audit Office has said there has been a "consistent pattern of underperformance" spanning 25 years. Twenty five years of reports saying the same thing. And nothing changes.

Add it up. HS2 overruns. NHS IT written off. £10.9 billion in Covid fraud. Universal Credit ballooning. Smart meters over budget. Post Office compensation approaching £2 billion. Fire Control. Rwanda. Garden Bridge. Tagging. And those are just the ones that made the news. The total runs into the tens of billions. More than the entire annual education budget. Approaching what the government now spends on debt interest in a single year.

And here's the scary part. This is only what we know about. The NAO has been clear the real picture is worse because most projects aren't properly evaluated in the first place. These are the failures too big to hide. Imagine the ones that aren't.

This is the same government that says there's no money for public services. That raises your taxes every year and delivers less every year. That can't build a railway. Can't roll out a computer system. Can't buy protective equipment without losing billions to fraud.

And every time it happens, the pattern is the same. The project fails. The minister moves on. The civil servant gets a knighthood. The contractor gets the next contract. And you pick up the bill.

The UK doesn't have a funding problem. It has a competence problem. And until that changes, no amount of tax rises, borrowing, or spending reviews will make the slightest difference.

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

I always weep reading the Wikipedia pages of senior Singaporean politicians. The general career path seems to be:

Excel at school and secure a scholarship to study some super difficult subject, like maths or physics, at Cambridge University.

Excel at university and get a scholarship to do a post-grad degree in governance or an MBA at Harvard.

Join the Singaporean military and excel. Reach at least the rank of Brigadier or General.

Enter politics. Excel even compared with others who have similar CVs, rise to become a senior position.

Compare that with the career path of the average senior British politican.

Get the same results as every other middle class child at school.

Do PPE or straight up politics at university.

Leverage your contacts to become a SPAD for a cabinet or shadow cabinet member.

Get a column writing gig at the Spectator, Economist or New Statesman

Become a more senior SPAD.

Run in an impossible to win seat to prove you really want to be in parliament.

Get parachuted into a safe seat as a rising star.

Get a junior ministerial position in the first reshuffle after the election.

Get made a cabinet member after the next election.

Now, why is Singapore an extremely well run country and we are not?

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon Stay safe man

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @spectatorindex What exactly do you mean by avoid? They just bombed them at the behest of Israel. We truly are in the most idiotic of times. Literally no lessons learned from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea etc. This is the guy that framed his entire foreign policy on America first and no war.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @bambibristol You could also argue that extortionate energy costs have contributed to the difficulty of successful enterprise as a direct result of…privatisation. Is minimum wage a bad thing now? CEO and board level pay has risen dramatically over the last few yrs in contrast to median pay

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @bambibristol But you’re comparing a country made enormously rich by fossil fuel wealth and further subsidised growth with indentured servitude, to a country that has sold off /privatised its oil and gas. Privatisation has failed here in every sector, unless you can point to any successes?

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @OfficialVizeh What would be the maximum expectation? Or what would he have to do to be given a chance? Farke never got financial backing with Norwich. And I think it’s the club that will attract players. Farke signed piroe, bogle, amps, tanaka and Rodon. He deserves a go surely?

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @OfficialVizeh I’m still confused by this thing - we had to sell our three most valuable players, bought tanaka and bogle for £10m combined, pissed promotion with our best ever goal difference, scored more goals than we have ever scored and people want farke out. What more do you want??

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @TheLeedsPress Ampadu CB, tanaka and rodon I reckon can do a job for us. Potentially Ramazani if he gets a good run.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @alterego1942 @SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews North Korea is currently sending missiles and troops into Ukraine, and Dubai has never been under threat pal so I think you’re safe there. Out of interest why are the Houthis attacking ships? Not a fan btw but interested in your take.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@alterego1942 @andymardon @SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews My point is that Trump is not a ‘broker of world peace’. He’s a rapacious, barely-literate felon with no class, decency or empathy. He has threatened allies with annexation, praised Putin and done huge damage to America’s reputation.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@alterego1942 @andymardon @SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews I mean they’ve even said they’re doing that because America interfered in the region. This only proves my point.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@alterego1942 @andymardon @SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews Probably best the USA intervenes then. Foreign interventions in the Middle East have worked out absolutely great so far.

[jay @jjayleeds]

@andymardon @SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews He’s literally just bombed Yemen.

[jay @jjayleeds]

Apparently we live in a world where a country can invade another country and kill thousands and then a large number of people side with the invaders and view the other side as ‘warmongers’.

[Stephen Flynn @StephenFlynnSNP]

This is absolutely fucking absurd.