Open Letter to the Isle of Wight Council and Andrew Turner MP By VB Reader

We always welcome Letters to the Editor, even those that are sent to the County Press but not printed. Ed

Last Thursday the Daily Telegraph featured prominently the scathing National Audit Office report on the absurd costs of PFI public projects.

It seems that we taxpayers are currently paying about £121.4 billion for various schools, hospitals, and so on which are worth only £52.9 billion.

That presumably includes our island’s present waste management PFI project, the estimated total cost of which has risen from about £17 million in 1997 to about £94 million today.

As there is therefore no good reason to replace the existing island road maintenance payment method with the proposed 25 year PFI road scheme and it’s unknown but predictably disastrous costs, may we now stop this nonsense, and perhaps use the unspent 3 or 4 million pounds from the money allocated to set it up to restore some local jobs and services instead?.

Steven Goodman, Newport

Image: Just A Name Thingie under CC BY 2.0