HM Treasury's ‘inadequate' monitoring of trading in Public Finance Initiative (PFI) debt has allowed banks and builders to ratchet up £2.2bn in undetected profits, an industry analyst has claimed.

There are about 920 PFI projects in the UK with a capital value of £72.3bn, of which 720 are operational. A report by Dexter Whitfield from think tank the European Services Strategy Unit alleges few PFI projects would have received approval if average subsequent profits of 50.6% had been taken into account at the evaluation stage.