Public and Private Partnership Paddington Health Campus Scheme Essay

Public and Private Partnership Paddington Health Campus Scheme - Essay Example Governments have numerous strategies for supplying public goods and services. Numerous of these strategies are partnerships with the non-profit or private agencies. The most recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in the formation of public-private partnerships (PPPs). The United Kingdom engaged in a new form of PPP in the 1990s to boost the participation of the private sector in public service provision (Robinson et al., 2010). According to Yescombe (2007), called the private finance initiative (PFI), the British Treasury Department has generated roughly twenty billion pounds to spend in public service management and private financing in the UK. PFI in the region has already been privatised. PPPs are public acquisition mechanisms which require private agencies to deliver services that are usually the obligation of the government. Fiscal and infrastructure demands keep on making these strategies appealing to governments, hence it is important to evaluate their outcomes (Hodge & Greve, 2005). This essay examines the Paddington Health Campus Scheme. It evaluates the actual driving forces and problems of the Scheme in terms of two issues: (1) strategic planning, and (2) working in partnership. It indicates that PPPs had dual sources: (1) a core theoretical assumption that productivity or competency would be improved by controlling competition in the market via private sector bidding, and (2) a macroeconomic strategy plan, motivated by an interest in regulating public debt (Hodge & Greve, 2005). Nevertheless, in actual fact, these productivity benefits are a long way from being mechanical—as stated by Geddes (2005), the successful progress of any PPP scheme hinges on a coordination of the objectives of operational, tactical, and strategic ranks of authority. Overview of the Paddington Health Campus It is practically useless to plan a complete business scheme and other actual reports for a PPP scheme of the private sector, or the market, does not view th e scheme as commercially appealing or fiscally workable. In the initial period of the PFI numerous schemes were marked down by the public sector as PPP-feasible, though, afterward it turned out that a significant percentage of these projects were actually not appropriate, because of a mixture of problems such as heavy contract requirements, brief contract durations, inadequate flow of income, and overflow of risk transfer (Cartlidge, 2006). Of late, the failure of the PFI Paddington Health Campus Scheme generated massive abortive costs and consultant fees. The Paddington Health Campus scheme was a complicated and aggressive project to construct a top-notch medical and research facility which in the end revealed weaknesses in the ability of the partners to work towards success. The project planned to set up high-tech and sophisticated medical services and to replace the dilapidated hospitals of Harefield, Brompton, and St. Marys (Great Britain: National Audit Office, 2006a, 4). The s cheme partners were Partnerships UK, Imperial College, St. Marys NHS Trust, Harefield NHS Trust, and Royal Brompton. The Outline Business Case (OBC) was endorsed in October 2000 by the NHS’s London Regional Office. It projected the overall cost of construction to be roughly 300 million. In May 2005, estimated costs had increased to 894 million and the date of completion was extended from 2006 to 2013 (Great Britain: National Audit Office, 2006a, 4). Initially introduced in 1998, the project was abolished after a major partner declined to back up the business case for the scheme (Robinson et al., 2010). The scheme was then restored. Circumstances such as this are apparently unfavourable for the reputation of PPPs as it disputes the entire method of this form of acquisition, in addition to the substantial waste of resources, effort, and time. Hence, if there are some uncertainties about the interest of private agencies in taking part in a planned PPP scheme, market scanning mus t be carried out at the soonest