ABSTRACT
During the past two decades the UK has played a leading role in the development and application of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) based infrastructure procurement through its Private Finance Initiative model. This model had been developed during the last years of the Major government and expanded during the early years of the Blair government. The banking and economic crisis of 2007-09 has created major challenges to the use of PPP in the UK, making the sustainability of past levels of PPP investment and the future direction of PPP-based infrastructure procurement in that country uncertain. This chapter summarises key developments in UK PPP up to the crisis; reviews the economic issues that have led up to the crisis; discusses the immediate impact of the crisis on the UK PFI and PPP market together with the transition arrangements that were put into place by the Brown government; and, lastly, looks at recent initiatives taken by Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government under the designation of Private Finance 2 (PF2).
