Introduction: Private Money for Public Infrastracture

Abstract

The question of how to finance public services and infrastructure has been a contentious issue in the United Kingdom at least since the Conservative Government in Westminster, in 1992, introduced the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) procurement method to secure private funding for public services and infrastructure. After 1997, the new Labour Government in Westminster essentially endorsed its predecessor's policies - but there was dissent in the devolved UK territories where policy­ makers started searching for alternatives. Our article documents and analyses an example for such a search. We explore the evolution of the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) as a central - and highly contested - plank of the Scottish National Party's strategy to finance Scotland's public services and infrastructure in place of PPP and PFI. The SNP, broadly Social Democratic in its policy objectives (McCrone &