UK taxpayers 'rarely' benefit from public-private partnerships, claims study Nearly 30 years after the UK Government turned to the private sector to help build the Channel Tunnel, the hybrid projects are still failing to produce "value for money," the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Manchester Business School have said. In the joint report, Professor Graham Winch of Manchester Business School said: "The value-for-money case for PPP in the public sector has yet to be proven. The benefits gained from the availability of 'extra' finance, the transfer of risk from public to private sector, and improvements in decision-making processes are too nebulous to provide any certainty that they outweigh all the known problems. The conclusion is a blow to the Government processes, which specifically set "value for money" as the main objective for PPP and its successor programme, Private Finance Initiatives (PFI). Even so the report argues that developed countries, like the UK and France, are likely to continue to use PPP because their governments want to use big infrastructure projects to boost economic growth but are too indebted to pay for them directly. "PFI has undoubtedly allowed the UK to acquire more social infrastructure earlier, and this has stimulated short-term economic growth, but it has led to an overhang of debt in the shape of commitments to unitary charges stretching some 30 years into the future and constraints on the flexibility of public bodies in using their infrastructure," said Professor Winch. The UK Government has £29.9bn of PPP liabilities on the balance sheet and a total of 642 signed contracts were in place by November 2011. The report, which is published on Wednesday, comes ahead of a Treasury review into the workings of PPP. It concludes that developing countries are following the UK's lead into PPP but the higher costs of private funds are balanced by faster economic returns from the introduction of the infrastructure.