Timeline of PFIS

● 1992: The Private Finance Initiative is born under John Major’s Conservatives.

● 1995: Britain’s first PFI project, Scotland’s Skye Bridge, opens. Within a decade, a public outcry over its high toll charges had forced the Scottish Executive to buy the bridge from its private owners at a cost of £27m.

● 1997: Two months after New Labour sweeps to power, Health Secretary Alan Milburn announces it is “PFI or bust” for the funding of infrastructure. Use of the model soars through the Blair and Brown years.

● 2007: The value of PFI deals peaks, with private companies investing £8.6bn in public infrastructure that year.

● 2008: Use of PFI falls in the wake of the financial crisis.

● 2011: The year after the Coalition government comes to power, two Parliamentary committees heavily criticise PFI. The Public Accounts Committee suspects companies are making excessive profits from the schemes, with chair Margaret Hodge MP warning that “tax revenue is being lost through the use of off-shore arrangements by PFI investors”. Meanwhile, the Treasury Committee finds the full cost of a hospital built under PFI is set to be 70 per cent higher than a publicly funded one. Committee chair Andrew Tyrie MP says they “can’t carry on as we are, expecting the next generation of taxpayers to pick up the tab”.

● 2012: Chancellor George Osborne relaunches the model as PF2, run in a similar way but with more details of the deals to be made public.

● 2018: Howard Davies, the chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland – itself a PFI investor – calls the model a “fraud on the people”. The National Audit Office publishes a report finding little evidence of its benefits. Later that year, Chancellor Philip Hammond abolishes PFI, but old schemes remain in place.