THE National is to be congratulated on running a series on PFI, the revival of which in a far greater and more pervasive form is at the heart of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s economic plan.

The series is timeous, following a major report this week in uk.investing.com which outlined Labour’s decision to sell off the remainder of Britain’s gas transmission network to the Australian multinational Macquarie.

The biggest owner of former public assets in the world, it also owns Edinburgh’s Royal Hospital for Children and Young People.

READ MORE: How Labour's PFI caused chaos in Scotland's schools

Revelations in The Guardian also suggest Labour signed an agreement with asset manager Blackrock to run large parts of the UK public sector.

At their core, these projects all involve handing over public services and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to international financiers, who then run them for profit.

In the late 1990s, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling justified private finance schemes claiming they were “the only show in town”. They were, they insisted, the only way Britain could get the new hospitals, schools, prisons, roads etc. it urgently needed.

The UK’s public finances “were shot” they argued, so we had to get private companies to build all our new infrastructure projects.

Sound familiar?

These two New Labour chancellors claimed that “no-one cares who owns these hospitals, schools etc as long as they remained free at the point of use”.

Dozens of publicly-owned facilities were consequently sold off, millions of staff found themselves working at the mercy of new private employers, and billions of pounds of public money poured out of NHS accounts and local authority budgets.

READ MORE: How Labour's PFI schemes locked Scotland's NHS into more than £7bn of debt

The financial crises affecting today’s NHS, local authorities and prison system can be traced back to those reckless New Labour decisions. The truth is of course the public cares about who owns their services. And they demand they are run without “profits” being deducted from the funds that are supposed to deliver frontline services.

Reeves and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have nonetheless declared their intention to sell off more and more public assets to private companies. The question is why?

These schemes have been widely discredited for a decade. Even the Tories who invented them don’t like them. Public finance watchdogs, parliamentary committees, think tanks, academics and service users alike have all condemned them for being inefficient, economically wasteful and politically bankrupt.

The public hates them too because the services provided are often sub-standard and well below the quality they expect. Look at the furore over the performance of privatised water companies in England today for example!

Some have suggested that Reeves’s PFI plan is designed to reward her new friends in the City. Labour are desperate to please finance capital and to urge it to “go easy” on its conservative economic strategy.

It is an unmistakable fact that PFI schemes wasted billions of pounds of public money. We found this out to our cost here in Scotland.

Seven NHS hospitals here were sold off to private companies over the past two decades. Edinburgh has two of them, the Royal Infirmary and the Sick Kids. Then we have Wishaw General, Hairmyres, Stobhill in Glasgow, Dumfries Royal Infirmary and Forth Valley Royal. Hundreds of millions of pounds were lost to NHS Scotland budgets after signing these utterly discredited contracts.

The peerless PFI critic Professor Allyson Pollock, now of Newcastle University, put it best when she said: “PFI is when you pay for three hospitals and get one.” She might have added: “And even then, it doesn’t belong to you!”

Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, for example, would have cost NHS Lothian £300 million to build in 2001. Instead, taxpayers will have to pay out £1.3 billion to Consort Healthcare – four times as much.

And according to the We Own It website, between them the 70 private companies holding PFI contracts with the NHS in Britain took out £1bn in profits last year alone. This is money that did not go to pay for operations or the extra staff so urgently required.

Private Finance Initiatives put key decisions affecting vital services into the hands of financiers, not doctors, builders or teachers. Labour’s embrace of PFI is not what the electorate voted for on July 4.

The Scottish Socialist Party has long advocated that we must return all those public buildings/facilities sold off to private companies under PFI to public hands. That means renegotiating those contracts – something that is done every day in the commercial world – to the advantage of the public purse, not the “for profit” sector.

The polls have conclusively shown for some time that privatisation is not popular with the electorate. Labour will therefore have to choose, in due course, between serving the interests of public service users and those of international financiers out to make a profit from facilities the people wish to see improved.

While we are waiting, I look forward to the further exposes of the horrors behind PFI this newspaper brings forth. More power to your elbow.

Colin Fox is national co-spokesperson for the Scottish Socialist Party