The private finance initiative (PFI) fell out of favour with the government in the aftermath of the crash, when borrowing money for 25 years at rates delivering the private investors double-digit returns made no sense even to HM Treasury. Since then, some valuable national infrastructure has been funded by local communities creating social businesses to produce renewable energy, accessing the money of ordinary people and mobilising them not only to invest it in socially and environmentally useful projects but to engage with one of the most pressing issues we face.
The decision to remove availability of tax reliefs for community energy projects (Government to cut tax relief for community green energy schemes, theguardian.com, 28 October), coming at the same time as it is clearing the way (contrary to pre-election pledges) for privately owned, profit-driven fracking businesses to operate wherever they choose, makes explicit the governent’s preference to allow private equity, venture capital and hedge funds to profit rather than allow individuals and families to invest in their own communities.
Meanwhile, the chancellor has given the Chinese government a big bundle of postdated cheques to build a nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. Just like PFI (though with guaranteed payments, not even reductions if it does not perform as it should).
And so a successor to PFI has emerged in CFI – sadly not a community finance initiative but a communist finance initiative as the Tory government commits us to paying exorbitant sums to the ruling party of China for years to come.
Are we all living in Armando Iannucci’s head, as this is a narrative bearing his hallmarks?
Dave Hunter
Bristol
• In a fortnight when the UK has rolled out the canapes and red carpet to China, the government continues to bend over backwards to accommodate Chinese interests, this time in relation to the radioactive folly that is the proposed Hinkley Point C (Hinkley Point subsidies could reach nearly £20bn, government admits, 30 October).
With every day that passes, the cost, the danger and the potential waste legacy grow larger; and all this at a site that overlooks the Severn Estuary/Bristol Channel, a space of renewable, tidal energy – whether in barrage or lagoon form. To be sure, tidal power generation is costly, but even the government’s own 2010 feasibility study suggested the proposed cost of a Severn tidal energy production would come under the rocketing bill for Hinkley Point. Is the UK really so desperate to cling on to Chinese patronage? Clearly, yes.
Joe Gerlach
Oxford
• Does the £25bn cost of Hinkley Point include decommissioning? What about the cost of looking after the radioactive waste for hundreds if not thousands of years. In 1952 when the Queen opened Calder Hall (name changed to Sellafield after the 1957 accident) I was a keen student of physics and distinctly remember it being declared that by the 1970s nuclear-generated electricity would be so cheap that it would hardly be worth taking the trouble to meter it. Something seems to have gone wrong somewhere.
John Ashwell
Eastleigh, Hampshire
• Forty five years ago Britain had three companies capable of designing and manufacturing nuclear power stations. The cost of electricity to the consumer was relatively less than it is now. Our (nationalised) electricity supply industry could build power stations without demanding a subsidy from the taxpayer.
Now we are pleased to buy a 60-year-old design of power station with help from the Chinese, with a possible spin-off that we may have more tourists and hence employ a few people in the service industry on the minimum wage. Well done, Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. We have nearly completed our race to the bottom.
Steve Green
Beaulieu, Hampshire
• Almost as an aside, Aditya Chakrabortty (Why aren’t we bailing out steelworkers, when we’ve spent billions on bankers?, 28 October) points out the UK’s poor record in applying for EU grant aid. To anyone who has seen the changes in local and central government over the past 15 years this will come as no surprise. Local and central government have become commissioners of services and not providers. One deliberate consequence has been the staff reductions. Those who remain are fully occupied in managing the tendering processes that will appoint the contractors who provide our services. They have no time to investigate and apply for grant aid.
A glance at France, which has more public servants per head of population, reveals their success at applying and obtaining grant aid for the public, voluntary and private sectors.
Richard Bull
Woodbridge, Suffolk
• Haven’t most big projects always been so-called vanity projects (Tales of hi-vis chicanery from Osborne’s favourite author, 29 October)?
Our now much revered Brunel is a good example. His most well-known project was to build a railway between London and Bristol but this was considered totally unnecessary at the time and there was huge opposition to it from landowners who said it would terrify farm animals, pollute the countryside and cause fires from the hot ashes of the steam engines, plus millions had just been spent building a nationwide canal network.
But had it not been for the early railways like Brunel’s Great Western, Stephenson and Huskisson’s Liverpool and Manchester, and Pease’s Stockton and Darlington it’s quite likely that the industrial revolution would never have taken place, or at least been severely delayed.
Laurie Way
London
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
