Private Funding Initiative

[Penmoel]

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/w...y-20m-for-2-7m-police-station-91466-32853731/

You could not make this one up.

Basically TRJ construction agreed to build a new Police Station at a cost of £2.7m in 2001 and lease the building to Dyfed Powys police for 20 years at - wait for it £700,000 per year rent!!

Home office and everybody agreed to the deal, now they want out of it??

TRJ not surrisingly want to stick to the deal- dont blame them they had the initiative!!!!
No wonder the country is going bust when they were entering these sort of deals

 

[RJ1]

Just saw this on the news and i couldn't quite work out how the building cost £21m! Then the deal was explained.

TRJ (and all the other companies involved in PFIs) must have been rubbing their hands and asking themselves what the catch was!

Who on earth started signing these off? There seems to be one high profile crazy scheme exposed every couple of months.

 

[sleepy]

Madness

 

[wobs]

pretty much the same as all of our new University Hospitals.

 

[Enry]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-21527563

30 years @£700k a year.....cost 2.7m to build....that is some return!! Makes you wonder if there were some members of the Police Authority who ended up being very rich on the back of that deal!!

 

[Walterp]

Ammanford is a very small town....

But what the local authority did to the OLD Police Station there would make you weep.

[Walterp sighs nostalgically and recalls all those midnight call-outs to the Ammanford cop shop, all at £50 per hour plus travelling....]

 

[Dave Applesquasher]

A fella I know buys office blocks off companies and then rents them back to them.
He's very rich on it.
I think it is fairly common practice but there are an awful lot of them costing the tax payer millions at the moment.
All very much down to the last Labour government too.

 

[RJ1]

Ammanford is a very small town....

But what the local authority did to the OLD Police Station there would make you weep.

[Walterp sighs nostalgically and recalls all those midnight call-outs to the Ammanford cop shop, all at £50 per hour plus travelling....]

Whether Ammanford is a big enough town to justfiy such a large station is one thing (but I think it needs more than a van in a car park twice a week), but the worrying thing is who looks at a £2.7m project and pays £21m?! What advice are they getting and did they actuall understand the deal? Or, as Enry suggests, is there something more sinister to it?

BTW, what happened to the old one? I haven't been up that way for a long time.

 

[Walterp]

Whether Ammanford is a big enough town to justfiy such a large station is one thing (but I think it needs more than a van in a car park twice a week), but the worrying thing is who looks at a £2.7m project and pays £21m?! What advice are they getting and did they actuall understand the deal? Or, as Enry suggests, is there something more sinister to it?

BTW, what happened to the old one? I haven't been up that way for a long time.

The old station was built in 1901 and was probably the handsomest building in the town (yes, yes, I KNOW that wasn't saying much...).

But it handled the workload just fine, even if it was old-fashioned, with lots of pokey offices for the CID. But cells are cells, right? And THEY haven't changed much from 1901 to date - I spent a lot of time in the 1901 ones, and a day banged up in Llanelli police cells in 2009, after being arrested, and I can vouch that there was no difference. So the shiny new facilities are for the staff, not the customers.

The old one? Sold for a knock down price to an Irish developer who promised to convert it to a themed bar (yes, yes, I KNOW you couldn't make that up...) but who, in the end, just knocked it down. At the end of the day, the local authority had to buy back the site and it now lies derelict....

 

[Penmoel]

They also say that owing to the high rental costs they are cant afford to have the front desk open to the public any more, just like they were saying last night about hospitals in london on pfi