Britain's Greatest: Ian Hislop. The interface between Government and commerce.

the interface between government and and um commerce essentially was where all our best scandals would be from pfi to tax to the works it's the fact that the public is paying always um for the risks which supposedly private enterprise is taking it is absolutely extraordinary pfi itself is one of the great scandals um this idea that you outsource everything and we're beginning to see bits of it fall i mean carillion i mean was the idea that you outsource every single function down to the point where a cleaner was having three separate companies dealing with paying her 35 quid a week one of which along the way was based in the cayman islands you know this is madness and that sort of i think um grotesque um you know it's it's it's capitalism um with its worst face on that we have either ignored or just come to accept a standard and i think that will stop trying to find out anything really anything now about that interface between public and private money you're just told it's confidential you know how much does this hospital contra cost to run you know i'm from we can't tell you that why not well it's owned um by a private company how much you know does it cost the parole service um to supervise two or three actually i'm afraid we can't tell you that this budget the chancellor said this pfi public finance uh initiative it doesn't really work um and i went back and i thought well we've been saying that for 24 years um and it's just it does become funny when someone suddenly says well you see what happens is that the public has to take the risk and private firms take the profit yeah that doesn't seem very fair does it you think oh god doesn't that depress doesn't that depress you it's sort of depressing but um in the grand scheme of things um if we don't have any more of them that's good news

Channel: Tom Neill

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Length: 1min 59sec (119 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021