Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

No. The use of public private partnerships is appropriate in certain but not all circumstances. PPPs are also a good vehicle by which we can encourage private sector investment to work with public sector investment to provide much needed infrastructure. Within the system of evaluation of public private partnerships, the use of a public sector benchmark ensures an assessment of the options is made on a value for money basis. In some cases, a PPP is not appropriate and in some cases it is appropriate.

With the increase in directly funded capital programmes, one cannot assume, in the overall budgetary context, that further publicly provided moneys will be available to the same extent as they are currently available through the PPP process. Private sector input provides a greater capacity to move a number of projects forward. PPPs are working exceptionally well in the roads area, for example, in terms of hard infrastructure. As is clear from the budget figures, in overall terms the vast majority of investment is made exclusively through public Exchequer funding. Various evaluations have been made and lessons can be learned but public private partnerships are a necessary part of the overall approach. To return to Leaders' Questions, there is no single exclusive way of doing things. A number of approaches need to be applied to try to deliver the outcomes we seek.

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