ABSTRACT
Through the Private Finance Initiative, the private sector is able to bring a wide range of managerial, commercial and creative skills to the provision of public services, offering potentially huge benefits for the Government. In order to assess the accountability of the PFI at the level of processes or mechanisms of accountability, we obviously need to consider its amenability to parliamentary and judicial control. When referring, in the context of the PFI, to the distinction between positive policy-driven regulation and regulatory control. The key to understanding the normative discourse of the PFI consists in the question whether the purpose and direction of the normative discourse is, on the one hand, that of positively promoting PFI contracts in pursuit of a policy of encouraging them. The fact that the regulatory and normative framework for private finance contracting in general and for the PFI in particular was informal in character had the crucial significance.
