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On Oct. 29, British Chancellor Philip Hammond formally announced that the Conservative government will sign off on no more P3-funded projects, ending 26 years of efforts to make the policy deliver its promised benefits, and limit its heavy costs.

This should serve as a belated wake-up call to Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, who announced plans for a $2-billion P3 hospital project in Halifax earlier in October and appears oblivious to the hard-learned lessons and the bitter experience of dozens of P3 failures in Canada and around the world.

Britain was the pioneer of P3 schemes, and is still the world leader in number of deals signed; according to city consultants PWC, two-thirds of current infrastructure P3s are in Britain or Canada.

Britain also has more than its fair share of P3 hospital projects that have proved costly mistakes for the hospital boards that signed them and the ministers who approved them: 129 schemes have been signed at a combined cost of almost £12 billion. They will cost taxpayers over £80 billion over 30 years or more.

It was John Major’s Conservative government that in 1992 first proposed the British equivalent of P3s, at the urging of construction firms and other private businesses eager to open up new profitable opportunities from public infrastructure projects. However, most of the P3 hospital deals were signed by Labour party administrations from the end of 1997 onwards.

Since then, we have seen evidence of poor design, safety issues and shoddy build quality. The first British P3 hospitals also held far fewer beds than the older hospitals they replaced: the first wave of P3 contracts averaged a 27 per cent reduction in acute beds, triggering crisis conditions and forcing some of them to continue using unsuitable older buildings.

Later P3 hospitals were built to enhanced design standards, but came at a sharply increased initial cost to build. One consequence in many areas has been to force the closure of neighbouring non-P3 hospitals — to generate cost savings and capital receipts. Almost everywhere, P3 projects have also diverted resources from other local health services (mental health and primary care) to prop up the budgets of the acute hospitals.

There is a British government plan to resolve the problem of the schemes already up and running: the payments for P3 hospitals will rise from almost £2.2 billion this year to nearly £2.7 billion in 2020. Much of this money now flows out of the country, to tax havens.

Since 2010, Conservative-led governments have tried to find ways to make their P3 model workable. But we have now seen the ignominious collapse of Carillion, the contractor involved in many P3 projects in Britain, Canada and elsewhere.

This halted construction of two substantial P3 hospitals, in Liverpool and Birmingham, which were left exposed to harsh winter weather while efforts were made to find an alternative private consortium to take over Carillion’s role and liabilities. None was found, and the government has had to terminate both P3s and fund work to complete the hospitals.

Britain’s Labour party had already decided to reject any further P3 projects, and plans to deal with the hundreds of projects.

So both British parties that were most convinced of the merits of PFI/P3s are now convinced they have none.

This also seems to be the considered view of many of the auditors general of the provinces across Canada which have experimented with P3s. Nova Scotia already has its own local failures, with the schools fiasco and the convention centre bleeding more dollars from the public purse.

Amid concerns over the lack of transparency when it comes to the Nova Scotia Health Authority, it seems especially alarming that the “evidence” for the merits of the P3 hospital project for Halifax centres on a report researched by Deloitte — one of the companies with a long record of promoting P3s — which Mr. McNeil’s government refuses to publish.

It is not surprising that ministers are eager to conceal a document that we can assume makes highly dubious claims to justify the extraordinarily high $2-billion cost of a 600-bed hospital and related units as “value for money.” It would be fascinating to see how they seek to justify spending the very precise sum of $151 million just to set up the P3 deal.

The Nova Scotia government should heed the latest change of heart in London, publish the Deloitte report and scrap the plan before more money is wasted. Instead, they should consider the many cheaper ways in which the much-needed new hospital could be financed and commissioned with transparency and public accountability.

There’s no shame in changing course when the evidence calls for it. But there would be lasting shame in signing a 30-year deal that Nova Scotia would certainly live to regret — when the evidence is staring you in the face.

John Lister, of Coventry University, England, is the author of an upcoming book on P3s.