Every month, North Ayrshire Council pays over £1 million to service debts to a private contractor, as part of some extremely bad deals the Labour-controlled council signed in 2006. In that year the Labour council signed a Public Private Finance (PPF) deal that effectively borrowed £380 million pounds from a German-led consortium/cartel to pay the same consortium/cartel to build four schools and service them for 30 years.
The interest on this amount means the full figure is far higher. This piece of insane bookkeeping was part of New Labour's strategy for keeping vast, inefficient increases in public spending off the national books, and therefore effectively a form of fraud.
As the video above shows, the reason the terms of the contract were so bad for North Ayrshire taxpayers is because the normal competitive bidding process for PPF contracts was completely circumvented by using a consortium and a fake alternative bidder.
The result of this is that North Ayrshire taxpayers have a legacy of crushing debt in return for very little -- a handful of unnecessarily modernized schools -- that will have an impoverishing effect on the area for years to come. This, it seems, is the reason why Irvine's Xmas decorations were so dire last Xmas.
The interest on this amount means the full figure is far higher. This piece of insane bookkeeping was part of New Labour's strategy for keeping vast, inefficient increases in public spending off the national books, and therefore effectively a form of fraud.
As the video above shows, the reason the terms of the contract were so bad for North Ayrshire taxpayers is because the normal competitive bidding process for PPF contracts was completely circumvented by using a consortium and a fake alternative bidder.
The result of this is that North Ayrshire taxpayers have a legacy of crushing debt in return for very little -- a handful of unnecessarily modernized schools -- that will have an impoverishing effect on the area for years to come. This, it seems, is the reason why Irvine's Xmas decorations were so dire last Xmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment