One of chancellor Philip Hammond's more unexpected Budget announcements was to quietly scrap the disgraced Private Finance Initiative. In practice this has been in suspension ever since it was replaced by PFI2 in 2012, which itself, has not been used since 2016. The Treasury Budget report simply commented that PFI was ‘inflexible and overly complex' as well as being ‘a significant fiscal risk to Government'.

Instead, the Department of Health and Social Care will ‘improve' the management of existing PFI contracts through a new ‘centre of excellence'.