Public private partnerships (PPPs) are the device at the centre of national development planning for procuring economic and social infrastructure. However, the PPP process treats the beneficiary public as a risk and a threat and not as a potential third partner.
Moreover, the process has been imported from places where the infrastructure is advanced without apparently questioning whether the deficit in our own society might make any sort of difference.
The secret of PPPs, so the public and private sectors tell us, lies in their flexibility. They release private-sector innovation. They add impetus to public programmes. They are a better way of delivering the development needed by Ireland to remain competitive and to grow its economy so as to maintain strong, sustainable output and employment. Above all, they deliver quality public services.
Those in favour of PPPs would also point to a decade of successful partnerships across Europe. They would explain the necessary criteria: that a PPP should be affordable, that it should require the private partner to assume an appropriate degree of risk and that the project should represent value for money.
Which means, in everyday language, that the PPP should not saddle our children with an unbearable cost, that the private partner should not think that the "partnership" will be a free ride, and that using a PPP should genuinely be more economical than if the State were to do the job itself.
No problem.
Those who oppose PPPs tend to be more emotional in their response. For example, something is going wrong with the process (think road infrastructure); or, how can those already excluded from the wealth of the nation expect to benefit from privately provided services? (think health infrastructure); or, into whose pocket will profit go? (think long-term mortgaging of what you thought was a common good).
The real difficulty for those whose gut instinct tells them that something may not be quite right with this wonderful thing called PPP is that there is no accessible, intellectually rigorous method of understanding the phenomenon. Society has no theory or guidance for scrutinising a process which the NDP has decided to use widely.
And our sense of helplessness in the face of State resolve is now becoming uncomfortable - whether it is from overloaded infrastructure in the south and east, or from missing infrastructure in the borders and the west, or from simply having something powerful done to us.
This appeared to change on November 1st, 2001, when Charlie McCreevy launched the Framework for Public Private Partnerships, a document which purports to fulfil the requirement of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness for an assessment of the appropriateness of PPPs and for guidance in their implementation.
Unfortunately, criticism can be levelled at the Framework which, in any event, is not intended for public education but designed for those in the public sector and for those with whom it contracts.
A useful starting point for public education is the three criteria which guided the early development of PPPs (affordability, risk transfer and value for money). The lessons they provided were generally unexpected.
We learned that those driving PPPs forward and interpreting operational requirements may not always have thought carefully enough about what they were trying to accomplish overall. We learned that there were often quite different, no less competitive, solutions for delivering projects, and that the workforce could be deployed more imaginatively without necessarily adopting a PPP solution.
Those were good lessons to learn. But, if the public vision was not clear at the outset, how could the costing of an alternative solution, provided from within public resources, convincingly tell you whether the PPP solution was really going to deliver value for money? This was not a good lesson to learn: sloppy thinking and less-than-rigorous public sector comparators soon get forgotten behind the compelling explanation that private partners deliver that essential quick fix.
Asking critical questions produces the curiously one-sided comment that it's all to do with value for money. The disappearance of the other two criteria (affordability and risk transfer) can be explained by their absorption into the PPP process of appraisal and procurement.
Here in the PPP route map and in the Framework, according to the jargon and argument, is a necessarily complex procedure made comprehensible; a management protocol for approaching the challenge of delivering public services and infrastructure reliably and effectively; a procedure which has been designed for environment portfolios but which State agencies will develop to meet the needs of other sectors. And it's all about value for money.
The reason society is handicapped by the absence of a theoretical framework for understanding the PPP phenomenon is that value for money is the product of sustained, establishment thinking.
Value for money has emerged from strategic management, from the pursuit of the three Es (efficiency, economy and effectiveness) and from copying commercial best practice; its roots lie in the historically elegant ideal of public service. And all we have, in contrast, is our gut instinct.
This should be telling us that value for money does not, of itself, mean value for the community (the people who by time, place and interest will be directly affected by the project). Calling us stakeholders will not bridge that gap. Neither will symbolic consultation, information overload nor the spin of referring to "value for the taxpayers' money". Something more should be demonstrated before a PPP is approved.
Consider, next, the Framework document itself. Grounds for challenge can be deduced from its express provision for review by those managing the process and for monitoring by the Department of Finance; from its implied provision for eventual audit on value for money grounds by the Comptroller and Auditor General; and from its omission of an intervening evaluation process by which the users can become involved.
With some justification, it may be asserted that this is a process which looks answerable only to itself and which, with the passage of the Public Private Partnerships Enabling Bill, will always be intra vires.
Furthermore, by omitting to stipulate how "the balance between economic and social benefits and costs" (section 4.5) should be resolved when adopting a PPP approach, the Framework document signals the inevitable disadvantage of those whom PPPs are meant to benefit. This is because quality public services are defined by the Framework as "the provision of a service to a level that meets or exceeds the requirements of the grouping to be served by the service and the public at large".
No PPP will deliver what the public requires, only what the public sector will pay for. PPPs can never, therefore, deliver quality public services. The Framework does not state, moreover, that project managers are obliged to point this out as part of the mandatory information flow.
And it remains to be seen whether ministerial championing, urged by advisers, will attempt to overcome the compromises inevitable in the pursuit of value for money by insisting that PPP solutions deliver best quality service; which could be thought a misleading use of language, if not also disingenuous.
What a pity the community was not genuinely able to contribute to this document, as is generally implied, and hears only the self-serving side of a noticeably exclusive discourse.
Martin Kay is researching public private partnerships at the University of Limerick