Members will find the full details of the recommendations in the report. I will concentrate briefly on two key areas. I will start with recommendation 1. First, and of crucial importance, is the need to establish an effective investment strategy. The Programme for Government begins to address this issue, but we need to go much further. The Programme for Government should, of course, underpin the strategy. This should be a unified, cross-departmental investment strategy to address how the deficit in the public infrastructure should be financed and managed in the future. We need to take the idea of joined-up government seriously when we consider investment, especially in areas where investment cuts across public sector boundaries.

A co-ordinated programme of strategic projects should support the strategy. That will enable, for example, early investment to be channelled into pathfinder projects that can best meet the strategy's objectives - clearly demonstrating value for money and the early development of a broader skill base in the public and private sectors. It is vital that the strategy have the support of all concerned. That includes the private and voluntary sectors and local communities.

PPP is supposed to be all about partnerships, and a social partnership approach should be adopted to achieve this consensus. Departments and their public and private partners need to reassess how they share information. Achieving that support may be difficult. We only have to look at the problems encountered in agreeing health priorities to understand the difficulties of achieving consensus. However, it is important that this happens, if we are to get value for money and provide long-term benefits to the public.

I now move to recommendation 2. The second key recommendation is that the Executive need to establish ministerial responsibility for driving the investment strategy forward. The Minister should be responsible for achieving a partnership across Departments and public bodies. There should be a common approach wherever possible.

The Committee considered that the Minister should set up a temporary working group of representatives from each Department. The group would then develop and drive the strategy forward in the coming months. It would also initiate work on the most appropriate investment methods to be used. Other tasks would be to promote a sustainable flow of projects and to look at the methodologies, skills and guidance.

The Committee also felt that it was important that the group begin the development of a social partnership approach. We found that this was of benefit when we looked at the Dublin situation, where social partnership, and the role of the partners, was crucial in taking forward an investment strategy. Although this work will get the process going, the Committee agreed that the strategy needs to be driven forward over the coming years. Therefore the Committee has recommended that a central investment board or procurement body be established under the control of a designated Minister. That would take on the activities of the working group, and it would become a centre of excellence on investment, procurement and advice for all Departments.

The issues addressed in this report are matters of crucial importance to our future social and economic well-being. My Committee took its duty very seriously and worked hard to achieve consensus and to agree a report that reflects its concerns and proposals for tackling the investment deficit. I commend this report to the Assembly, a LeasCheann Comhairle.

I thank the Chairman for his very thorough review of this report that the Committee has just published. This was a major undertaking into an area of potential public procurement that is a hot potato of conflicting opinions. We, I hope, encountered, and gave proper consideration to, all of them.

My first point is that it would be far easier to do this review in 10 years' time, when you would be able to draw on, perhaps, a maximum of 15 years' experience of private finance initiatives and public-private partnerships. The initiative started in 1994. The first projects appeared a few years later, and most of the projects that the Committee looked at were very much in their infancy. While it is easy to identify problems that occurred when putting together the contracts, conducting the negotiations and dealing with the bids, it is impossible at this stage to accurately judge how well a 30-year contract has been costed when it has only run for three years.

There is therefore a considerable act of faith involved, particularly by those who are strong advocates of the private finance initiative and public-private partnerships. However, we do not have the luxury of being able to put the clock forward 10 years, so we have to base our assessment on the evidence currently available. The Committee has therefore tried to present as balanced a view as possible of that evidence, given that some of it is inconclusive.

There are a number of important points that raise various issues. First, the provision of public services, which really started to accelerate from the post-war reforms, has meant that 50 years later the Government have become a huge owner and manager of property. Government Departments are now starting to question whether that should be such a major activity of government.

The Committee has recently heard from the buildings and maintenance section of the Department of Finance and Personnel. It has put on the table a bill for £37 million for urgently required refurbishment to key buildings. The spending and prioritisation of that money, and the awarding of the contracts, will be a big job. Over the next few years, it will inevitably involve a great deal of effort. That is an example of an ongoing activity that the Government are confronting.

Members are familiar with the figures involved in the education sector, where £500 million is required to address the shortfall in school buildings. At current rates of spending from traditional procurement methods, that will probably take somewhere in the region of 15 years - perhaps longer - to achieve. During those 15 years, other bills will land.

The Department of Education in particular has been active in using PPPs because it can, in effect, bring some of that expenditure forward. To some extent, it means spending tomorrow's money today. If £60 million can be spent every year on school buildings, that will mean £600 million being spent over 10 years. By financing the activity through the private sector and paying for it in instalments, the building programme can be brought forward. However, it will have to be paid for in the end - one way or another.

There is a delusion among people that somehow or other you do not pay for it; you most certainly do pay for it - the public sector pays for it. If you buy something through hire purchase it is likely that you will pay a bit more for it than would otherwise be the case. However, one must balance that factor against the benefit of getting the use of the asset much earlier than would otherwise occur.

Another point relating to schools was put to us, with considerable vigour, by the Department of Education and Science in Dublin. Departmental officials stressed to us the great benefit that schoolteachers derive from not having to be concerned with the management and maintenance of the building in which they work.

The feeling in Dublin was that this was so valuable that it was not all that necessary for them to try to put a cost on it. They were in a much happier position than us. They have the money to meet all of their building requirements and can choose whether to do it by traditional public procurement or by some form of PPP.

In a number of cases, they have deliberately chosen to use PPP because of the benefit they foresee in schools not having to be concerned with the problems of management and maintenance of buildings. Therefore one can draw a tentative conclusion that if it is cost-neutral between the traditional procurement and PPP alternatives, then the extra benefits tend to favour going down the PPP route.

Even if there is some cost disadvantage in going down the PPP route, it may still be worthwhile if you think you will get extra benefits from how you will be able to use the facility. The difficulty is in trying to judge the size of the numbers involved over the lifetime of these projects - a typical period would be 20 to 30 years.

There is perhaps a tail-end benefit, and it relates to the current state of the Government estate. The Government own very fine Victorian buildings, which are not particularly helpful for modern use, though they were undoubtedly magnificent state-of-the-art buildings in their day. The same situation may occur now. In 30 years' time we may own a building that was good to have in 2000 but does not suit its purpose in 2030. It might be beneficial if such a building did not belong to the Government at that time. It could be put back into the lap of the private sector to do something else with, while the Government could contract for a new building that would be state-of-the-art in 2030.

When you are building, one of the advantages you are likely to get through PPP is that you will receive the best of private sector innovation, and you are likely to get the benefit of leading-edge construction techniques.

As the private service provider would be responsible for maintaining the building, it would have to assess carefully the trade-off between how much it spends on construction and how much it will have to spend on maintenance. Under public procurement, the tendency would be to save money now, but possibly pay for that with maintenance costs in the future. The way in which that particular cake is divided is one of the cores of controversy concerning the worthiness of PPPs.

There is another issue arising, and it is one that is particularly topical at the moment. It concerns the fate of public service employees if a private service provider takes over the part of the public service in which they work. We heard a considerable amount of evidence from trade unions on this matter. We also heard from the private sector. The Government at Westminster have made some pronouncements on this matter recently regarding health service employees. It was said that they could be seconded to the private sector. We have not heard a detailed reaction from the private sector about this yet. However, I strongly suspect that it may prove to be much more difficult in practice than the Government imagine. I do not think that that will be the last word on this subject.

I did not find the evidence presented to us about the potential problems for public service employees particularly convincing. It seemed to me that the evidence for the emergence of a two-tier workforce implied that the private sector part of the workforce was the better tier to be in. I do not think that we would have heard so much about it if it were felt that public sector employees were in an advantageous position.

However, I acknowledge that the development of PPPs will remain a controversial issue for some time.

I have been talking mainly about buildings in relation to schools and hospitals. The Committee was focused, in its deliberations, on the built infrastructure deficit and did not look into the potential for providing public services through the private sector. Had it done so it would not have come up with much enthusiasm for going down that course. It is worth emphasising that we are talking about the deficit in the built infrastructure and how that might be addressed in the short term.

Irrespective of whether infrastructure is built by public procurement or by public-private partnerships, the same construction firms are going to be involved. It is a question of the contract under which they carry out the activity. If we were to engage in a major programme of public-private partnerships with a view to accelerating the speed at which we renew and replace our public service infrastructure, the construction industry is going to have to gear up to meet that need. It is reasonable for the construction industry to require a clear plan laid down over some time so that it can gear up to meet the need.

Turning away from the area of schools and hospitals, I want to talk about transport, which is the other principal area for using public-private partnerships. This is highly topical subject recently because of the ongoing wrangle about the London Underground. That example is not a helpful one, because the London Underground is a large- scale project, in excess of anything that would concern us. There are, however, some points of principle involved that are relevant to any city looking to improve its public transport.

When building schools and hospitals one simply looks at how to draw down forthcoming Government expenditure and how, through PPP, private finance might be mobilised to accelerate the rate of build. However when looking at transport there is a wider range of options. Public transport generates revenue in the form of fares, and the revenue stream provides an opportunity to raise money in other ways. Mention has been made of the use of bonds, although I am concerned at the undefined and imprecise way this is talked about. It is not likely that the Executive of the Northern Ireland Assembly are going to issue a bond. Going by previous experience, that would cause considerable difficulties with the Treasury. It is possible that there may be devices whereby a separate entity could be set up which owned a proportion of the fares of a public transport service and where those fares acted as security to service a bond. With that money it might be possible to expand the service to be provided. That is, however, predicated on the basis that the fare base is big enough. With our relatively small population, I suspect that we would be looking at an injection of public money as well. That is not a good reason for not getting involved in that; there may be a combined strategy there that would be suitable.

There is also the question of congestion charging, that is, charging people to take their cars into Belfast.

It is also possible to raise money through tolls. The key to this is the existence of sufficient demand for the use of the road for which you wish to charge a toll. It is preferable to have an alternative, so that the payment of the toll is an entirely voluntary act. For some reason people think that it is acceptable to pay a fare to travel by rail but that it should cost nothing to drive their car on a road. That is not necessarily realistic for a motorist who wants to travel at the same time as many others. However, if a motorist has the choice between queuing on an existing crowded road or paying a toll to drive down a brand new highway, he will eventually go down the new road when he is in a rush. After that he will never travel on the old road again. That has been the experience in regard to the toll roads in Dublin.

We must be prepared to be imaginative, and there is a likelihood of short-term unpopularity until the benefits flow through. However, political parties must decide whether they are prepared to take on this responsibility in order to achieve a long-term benefit. We must remember that the payment of tolls and congestion charges is a voluntary act. There are other ways of travelling free of charge, but they might mean a longer journey.

I seem to have been talking for some time, Mr Speaker. I do not normally have this much time. I will try to wind up.

You must use it all when you get it.

Absolutely. The question of whether Northern Ireland gets a fair deal from the Treasury under the Barnett formula frequently arises in the House. It is not useful to speculate about the creation of a new formula when making plans to address our infrastructure deficit. We must work with the figures that are currently available. If we were able to persuade the Treasury to give us more money, it would be a nice problem to have, and we would have no difficulty in allocating these funds. Realistically, we have to work with what we have now, and with conservative projections of what it will be worth in the future. We must remember that Northern Ireland receives some £10 billion from the Treasury, and our tax base is estimated at around only £5 billion. We therefore have to take the view that we are being treated generously.

We are identifying the benefits of PPPs and the considerable problems involved, which are well highlighted in our report. One of the main benefits of PPPs is that they force Governments to plan and budget for the long term - not just to build things, but to maintain them to the same standard. By engaging in a contract for 30 years, a Government is tying up money for 30 years. By entering into more contracts, the Government ties up more money, which might otherwise have been available in, for example, 10 years' time. Nonetheless, there are considerable opportunities for accelerating the rate at which we address our infrastructure deficit. Several of these would soon benefit Northern Ireland considerably.

As the Chairperson of the Committee has stated, this debate comes at an opportune time. This debate, its outworkings, and the decisions that will be taken in response to it, could shape decisions that affect our community for several years to come. They will have an impact on our society for many years.

It is an unpalatable fact that the public infrastructure in Northern Ireland is in a very poor state. That is not an exaggeration - it is an understatement. It is estimated that several billion pounds are urgently required to put right the clear deficit in investment over the past 30 years, and to right the wrongs of neglect and violence.

Pages 47 and 48 of volume one of the report draw attention to the priorities published by the Executive in the Programme for Government in February 2001. The 33 paragraphs on those two pages should not be dismissed as a wish-list, but should be seen as the needs of our society if we are to achieve the goals that we have set ourselves.

I will highlight some of those points, such as the need to provide for an anticipated 250,000 new households over the next 25 years and the need to address hospital waiting lists - 18% of patients in Northern Ireland have been on waiting lists for over 12 months. Community health and social care support also needs to be addressed, because there are 4,000 people waiting for that. Demographic changes clearly show that there will be increasing pressures on available resources.

The shortage of university places must also be addressed. Many young people leave Northern Ireland to further their education, and most of them do not return. The need to address the deficiencies in our roads, public transport, energy, telecommunications, and water and sewerage infrastructures has already been mentioned. By 2005, waste water treatment works must achieve 80% compliance with environmental and heritage standards.

The crux of the issue is that the Executive need to operate collectively to bring about the necessary improvements in the Barnett formula. Barnett does not recognise or adequately address the needs of the people of Northern Ireland. It is therefore incumbent on the Executive to operate collectively - and I stress the word "collectively" - to ensure that the Treasury gives financial expression to our needs.

I live in the real world, and I recognise that waiting in hope for the justification of our needs in equity and fair play to be realised and recognised by the Treasury will take a long time. To do nothing is not an option in this situation. We must tackle our huge problems sooner rather than later, because time, in this respect, costs a lot of money. It is therefore imperative that alternatives be examined. The publication of our report comes at an opportune time.

It would be wrong to see public-private partnerships as a panacea for all our ills. The cheapest money must be public finance. Any alternative must, by definition, be seen to be more expensive. Hire purchase is always more expensive than cash purchase.

It would be equally wrong to erect ideological barriers against public-private partnerships. Partnership undoubtedly has an important role to play, but lessons must be learned from the past. We must learn how to protect employees and avoid spending public money on bad employers. We need to recognise that risk ultimately lies with the public sector. We should not be drawn into heavily front-loaded contracts with no real idea of the full delivery costs over the full term of the contract. In short, we must see that value for money is the key over the full term.

We must be conscious of the effects that long-term contracts will have in future, and we must demonstrate clearly that lessons have been learnt from the past. For example, we are still paying very dearly - very dearly - for long-term contracts in the privatisation of the electricity industry in Northern Ireland.

The report from the Finance and Personnel Committee sets down vitally important recommendations that are aimed at ensuring that we make progress in addressing underinvestment in a constructive, methodical and joined-up manner. Co-ordination must be the name of the game, and it must be done by a team headed by a Minister who will be responsible for driving forward a unified service- wide investment strategy that will have accepted and examined all possible options.

Although our terms of reference were clearly focused on public-private partnerships and PFIs, whoever leads our investment strategy team should examine closely all alternatives and options, including what Mr Leslie called "bonds". Mr Leslie should read a recent paper by Prof Austin Smyth and Jamie Delargy entitled 'Bonds - a Capital Idea'. It emphasises the strong potential that bonds offer for dealing with our infrastructure deficit, and it draws particular attention to the non-profit owned company that deals with the Welsh water and sewerage system. I also draw attention to the recent 'Building Better Partnerships' report by one of the top think tanks. It gives an analytical breakdown of the pros and cons of PPPs and the direction in which we should go in future.

The report that the Finance and Personnel Committee produced after much work and thoughtful consideration should be the cornerstone upon which we build a centre of excellence for future investment and procurement. That goal should not be outside our reach. We have a golden opportunity to strive for excellence, and this report provides the cornerstone.

I join the Chairperson of the Finance and Personnel Committee in expressing my gratitude to our staff who dealt admirably with a very complex and serious issue. The hours that they were obliged to work because of tight timescales must be recognised. Their admirable work has produced a report that should be a cornerstone for the future.

This is a very comprehensive report that left me with as many questions as it did answers on the way forward. The Chairperson of the Committee referred to the Department of Education and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Training and Employment, which are probably the only two Departments that can give us any detailed information. They were the only Departments to ask for additional funding in the spring Supplementary Estimates for last year, and as such I found very little detailed information on the report's main recommendations. The report gave a guarded welcome to a greater introduction of PPPs. However, it seems to me that it does not have the information to make such a recommendation.

Has the Committee considered referring some of these issues to the Civic Forum, particularly where a recommendation is made for a unified service-wide investment strategy? It is a novel idea, and it draws on the support of the voluntary and community sector and the private sector. Given that the Civic Forum involves those sectors as well as the trades unions, it may, for once, be useful for the Assembly or an Assembly Committee to ask the Civic Forum to put those sectors together to test their ideas on the way forward on public-private partnerships.

It seems to me that the issue is going the same way as many previous recommendations from the Executive, and that is to hand most of the work to an interdepartmental group that then relies on civil servants to bring the ideas forward. I suggest that we go to the sectors that work with the problems of finance and securing resources and ask for their views.

There are four areas that the report needs to do more work on. First, there is the question of the openness, transparency and accountability of the public-private partnerships that are in place. Secondly, there is the issue of the impact of public-private partnerships on the community, particularly where the report refers to the need to meet the human rights and equality obligations set by the Executive. Thirdly, there is very little in the report about alternative methods of procurement, despite Mr Leslie's views today. Seamus Close mentioned bonds, and there are many questions still to be answered and many technical problems with the Treasury's views on public bonds. Finally, there is the issue of risk transfer.

The major issue is the lack of openness and transparency in public-private partnerships. The report explains how one individual asked for a business case, and even though there were commercial interests at stake, he could not get information about Transport 2000 from one Department. If we cannot get that information, how can we provide empirical data that shows that public-private partnerships work?

The report states that

Given that, how can the report reconcile its conclusion that, albeit cautiously, we should pursue public- private partnerships?

All the information seems to lie with the bidder or the contractor, so it is easy for them to demonstrate value for money because that depends on what they include or exclude and how they determine what costs will be counted and over what period. Some projects may be value for money but unaffordable. They can also be poor value for money and unaffordable. The difficulty is that schemes may be pruned to make them affordable, or that extra public resources - as we know has been the case - get thrown at them, hence the land sales, asset transfers, capital grants and capacity and service reductions that are so prominent in hospitals, schools and in the passport agency projects that we know about.

Experience in England indicates that the value of either private finance initiatives or public-private partnerships shows the estimated size of the capital element to be financed by the private sector but excludes the public sector contributions. That comes back to the point I made about the lack of transparency. I know from my own constituency that in general land sales and asset transfers were arranged with extremely advantageous terms for the private sector.

That brings me to the impact of public-private partnerships on local communities. We have section 75 and the Human Rights Act, and this is probably the most audited Assembly in the Western World - if not the entire world. Every policy must be audited and ticked off on how it impacts on certain categories of people and communities. However, we are going forward with a policy without knowing what its impacts will be.

Let me give Members an example of one public-private partnership that did not work and was disadvantageous to a local community.

Wellington College, which was in great need of replacement, went down the PPP road. A consortium of builders was put together under the name of Northwin Developments. The consortium put in a successful application for planning permission. However, a problem arose when the Department of the Environment told it that part of the land had been designated for playing fields. By this stage the consortium was now the owner of the land, and as the owner, it decided that it could do what it liked with the land. The consortium decided to put up more housing than had been scheduled in the original plans. It claimed that the land was left over after it had finished building the school.

The community was not against the new school or the first proposal for the number of houses to be built. However, as the planning process continued the community discovered that their playing fields, which was the only piece of open land they had, were also going to be built on. This was an interesting example, because the Department of the Environment said that the consortium could not build on the land, but the Department of Education said that the consortium owned the land and could therefore do what it wanted with it.

I attended a public inquiry where a debate took place about what should happen and about what powers were available. Ultimately, it was extremely disadvantageous to the community to be told that they really did not have to be consulted about what happened to the playing fields.

I want to see the conditions that would be put on future PPPs. I did not see much about that in the report. I have great concerns too for the future if supermarkets and high-density developments were to be built on the small number of playing fields and green spaces that we have in a city such as Belfast. Undoubtedly, much of this is taking place because of developments between the public and the private sectors.

I also have concerns about management. The report has some worrying conclusions and makes comments about schools being managed by people who have been a part of the contractual arrangements. Presumably this could apply to hospitals as well. Many questions still need to be asked.

I have concerns about the difference between the objectives of the public and private sectors. The private sector has moral obligations to investors that take priority over social obligations to customers. On the other hand, we are told that the public sector is motivated by social responsibility and environmental awareness. Therein lies the crux of the problem: two sets of objectives that fly in the face of each other. Experience to date suggests that the private sector's objectives will win over those of the public sector.

There is scant mention of other methods of procurement in the report, although it talks about a non-profit making trust for infrastructure investment. However, that is all - it simply refers to it and says that it would require significant further development. The report more or less dismisses the idea out of hand. As well as non-profit making organisations, there are public bonds - and those leave as many questions as they answer. We really do not know what we are talking about here, and the report does not offer us much enlightenment.

What are the alternative funding arrangements or methods of procurement? The terms of reference state that the Committee was looking specifically at public-private partnerships, but that does not forbid the opportunity to go into detail about what exists elsewhere, particularly as the Committee was attempting to examine international as well as national experiences.

We come to risk transfer and the whole-life costs of a project. The contractor is clearly in a very powerful position here. The risks may be minimal if the project works.

If a public-private partnership does not work, the public sector will have to take on the risk and costs of that failure. The Executive must deliberate this question if they are to go down this road and hand the risk over to trusts and boards.

As an aside, if the Executive were to consider the option of bonds, I wonder how much credit a long-term investor would give us for a bond given the current state of the Assembly and the Executive. Failed private projects are very worrying.

Does the Member agree that in circumstances in which the asset has been built, and the private sector provider has gone bust, the public sector is in the best possible position because it has the asset and has not fully paid for it?

That is assuming that, at that stage, the asset has any worth. The providers that go bust are the ones who supply badly constructed buildings in the first place. We have seen examples of that in England - and they have come about as a result of shady deals. The partnerships that we want to invest in are those that do not have a high risk attached to them. The assets that have been handed over to the public sector - and as usual the poor public sector picks up the pieces - are those that have been dodgy from the outset.

Many people wonder whether it was value for money. The assets become affordable only because developers have cut so many costs and corners. Then, in order to manage the assets, the private sector providers must ask for more money from the public sector to keep going. The public sector continues to bail them out until eventually it has to take over.

Finally, trade unions do not oppose these partnerships simply because of private funding. Nowadays, trade unions are trying to find out what is good value for money. However, they have urged a cautious approach, particularly where there are huge implications for workers. Which parts of the Health Service will remain as its profitable side? In contrast, which parts will be thought of as the poor sisters of the Health Service? That issue is a particularly interesting one for those of us who are involved in projects like mental health, rather than the acute side of the Health Service.

Most importantly, the report has not suggested criteria that can determine whether a project is suitable for PPPs. I hoped that this report would give us criteria that we might call "useful pieces of audit", by which we could decide to tick off on a project. Those responsible for the report could not answer that - they said the information was not available to them. Ultimately, I am disappointed. I strongly commend the Committee for its initiative in undertaking the first stage of a much longer-term project for the examination of PPPs.

First, I would like to point out that the resources available under the existing Barnett formula are insufficient to meet the needs of our society. It would be desirable to have all our public services provided from public resources, but unfortunately that is not possible. Therefore we have to look at innovative means by which we can fund our public services. I am not advocating PPP or PFI for the sake of it. Rather we need to use those approaches because financial realism dictates that in-house financial turnover is inadequate.

It is essential to leave no step untaken in attempting to address the poisonous legacy of the underinvestment that occurred under direct rule. It is a system that the detractors of the Good Friday Agreement wish to return to. We must not only address underinvestment but increase resources so that we can achieve more ambitious targets for society.

For example, we could have three or four capital programmes through PFI or PPP that could be used in the future. We need to ensure that the effects of what we have talked about, with regard to joined-up government, are being delivered. We will need to ensure that we have a skilled workforce ready to deal with the demand.

It is important that PPP or PFI initiatives be publicly accountable, be value for money and, most of all, be transparent. The reality, which has been touched on already by several Members, is that we need to increase the educational provision for our children, create better roads, build a stronger economy and increase and improve the care of our sick, elderly and most vulnerable. These ambitions drive us forward and spur us to action. However, if we are to achieve our goals we must back them up with a clearly thought out financial strategy. The PFI/PPP instrument is one - and only one - way of achieving those goals.

When we utilise the instruments of PFI and PPP, we need to ensure that we evaluate their pertinence and impact. We must realise, as Seamus Close said, that this is not a panacea for all our ills. However, we should not, and cannot, discount it before due consideration. That would be absurd and would be doing a great disservice to our people, especially those most in need. Whatever we do must be consistent with the core commitment to social and democratic objectives - the creation of equality of opportunity, targeting social need and high-quality public services. We need to derive benefits from the use of PPP. Indeed, we should have as a ministerial approach "Ask not what your Department can do for PPP or PFI, rather what can PPP or PFI do for your Department's needs". There is a need to properly examine this complex area, and I am sure that this report will contribute significantly to the debate. Furthermore, this is why I welcome the high level task force announced by the Minister of Finance and Personnel.

In conclusion, properly used PFI and PPP, which will enable provision of services free at the point of delivery, can have a place in the overall financial strategy of any Administration. However, it should not - and I am sure will not - become an objective. Rather it should always remain a strategic option. At this point, I, like the other members of the Finance and Personnel Committee, wish to add my thanks and appreciation to the staff for their commitment and the tireless amount of work that they put into compiling this report, which I support.

I welcome this report by the Committee for Finance and Personnel. It is very comprehensive and includes evidence from a wide range of witnesses ranging from harsh critics of the idea of PPP through to people promoting the idea with evangelical zeal.

Anybody who took the time to read the report will have noticed that several things became abundantly clear from the evidence. There is undoubtedly a major infrastructure deficit and a concern over the lack of delivery of public services. Reference was made to issues of devolution and direct rule. Certainly, infrastructure has suffered under direct rule, but it is not a problem relating solely to Northern Ireland. If you had followed all the issues in the general election, you would have seen widespread concern throughout the UK, and, indeed, beyond, at the lack of investment in public services.

No matter how much we readjust Barnett, or look at moving it around, the advantage that can be brought purely by way of traditional public procurement methods is not going to be able to meet the full demands of public expectation and demand for increase in investment into public services and infrastructure. As indicated by the Minister, that route is simply not going to be sufficient. Consequently, we have to look at other means including PPP. I appreciate that the report takes a very cautious view to PPP, which I think is right. We are not in a position to be able to evaluate how PPP has worked at the end of a full life-size implementation of any of the projects, because we are still at the early stages.

The report is even more cautious on bond schemes, which are at a much earlier stage of development in, for example, the Department for Regional Development.

It is right to keep an open mind as to which method we use to find additional investment for public services. It is clear that PPPs and perhaps bond schemes have to be considered, but it is important always to realise that they are only tools to achieve public investment. Be it PPP or anything else, we are looking at a means to an end rather than an end in itself. That is the crucial thing to remember.

Northern Ireland has been slow to go down the road of PPP. Indeed, compared with the rest of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, we are well behind. While there is a certain disadvantage in that, we should take advantage of the adage and look elsewhere for examples of the route that we as a Province should take.

It has been said that a wise person learns by his mistakes, but an even wiser person learns by the mistakes of others. If we apply that adage, there are certain things in the report that can point to a direction by which I hope we can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made elsewhere. Particularly in its recommendations, the report concentrates less on a particular model for PPPs or bond schemes that is the panacea to all our problems, but looks at what is best practice and the structures that should apply. Thus, the idea of the need to pool experience and to pool that level of expertise throughout the Civil Service in order to provide the best infrastructure decisions is important.

The desire to co-ordinate very much runs through the recommendations, whether by way of having a Minister designated to look after the issue through the working group, or by way of the central investment body. All those things are focused on the key aims of pooling experience and expertise and of co-ordination. Here I take issue with some of the things that another Member said. Whatever route we take to deal with the infrastructure deficit - the current public procurement, bond schemes or PPPs (and it is likely to be some combination of those) - in years to come we will see a greater degree of private sector involvement. As such, the dichotomy between the traditional means of public procurement and PPP is perhaps not always as great as it is portrayed. If, for example, a school or hospital is being built, you can take the methodology of PPP and use that scheme, but even if you use the traditional procurement method you are contracting out the building of that school or hospital. Some of the risks that relate to the private sector will be there consistently, no matter which route you take.

Several issues arise out of that. There is a need for a sustainable deal flow within any investment strategy. One of the concerns that several Members had at the start of the inquiry was that if we went down the route of PPP, the local private sector would be overwhelmed by the amount of contracts coming online, and that that would create problems.

However, one piece of evidence that came from the local private sector was that its concern at the moment is the reverse - that the deals and contracts that have been made available by the public sector have been so insufficient, and so stuttering in their delivery, that there is a danger of not getting the opportunity to build up the level of expertise, and that the sustainable deal flow is not being created. Therefore we have to, via the methods that have been outlined in the report, produce that sustainable deal flow in order to ensure that local firms in Northern Ireland are best able to deal with the problems they are facing.

We are facing some sort of mix of public procurement and PPP in the future. There are benefits to be gained from the competition between those two sectors that will be beneficial to the public purse. There is also the issue of standardisation of contracts to ensure that there is transparency, but also that we do not have undue cost and undue delay in fulfilling some of these deals.

There is also the issue of value for money. It is important that we do not simply look at the cheapest route to produce a particular infrastructure. Indeed, as has been said, it would be a mistake to do so. Some of the qualitative issues must also be considered in relation to the benefits of PPP, as outlined by James Leslie and others, such as the freeing-up of resources. If the contractors not only design and build a building but also operate the building, they have a greater incentive not to cut corners and to provide something that is sustainable for the long term.

PPP and public procurement as a whole must be used as a means to an end and as a device to accelerate public investment. However, care must be taken that in dealing with long-term contracts we do not tie up so much public investment as to reduce flexibility for the future. The opportunity exists for the public sector to ensure that resources can be reallocated in the future.

The report's recommendations map out a sensible and cautious way forward to deal with the public sector investment deficit. Unless we start tackling the infrastructure issue now, and through the method put forward by the Committee, we will only be storing up trouble for the future. This is a cautious, but realistic, way forward, and I commend the report to the House.

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