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The Private Finance Initiative (PFI), introduced to Britain in 1992, has become a major means of procuring public sector infrastructure. It involves long‐term contracts whereby private sector suppliers construct and own capital assets and provide services for which they are paid on the basis of availability or use. This paper focuses on the early stages of a PFI procurement, the decision to use the PFI rather than any other form of procurement. In 2004 and 2006, the UK Treasury issued new Guidance as to how this should be done. There are two stages to this Guidance: qualitative and quantitative assessments. This paper comments on some of the key issues in the quantitative assessments: the treatment of risk, of residual and life‐time costs, of tax, of rates of return and of the appropriate use of discounted flow techniques when finance is a constraint for an investing agency.

The possible adverse consequences of many regeneration partnerships in a single area was raised by Peck and Tickell in 1994 and the Audit Commission in 1998 and again in 2005. This paper illustrates some of the issues through a study of four regeneration partnerships active in North West Birmingham. They operate in an area which has some of the highest unemployment in Britain, and has participated in almost every government-funded regeneration initiative since the 1980s. They work in the context also of the Birmingham Strategic Partnership charged with co-ordinating activity across the whole city, and the City Council's decentralisation to Districts, Wards and Neighbourhood Forums, with its own political and partnership structures. This article compares and contrasts the four partnerships, showing how each is the result of a separate central government initiative. In theory the resources available to the different partnerships could be pooled, and then reallocated so that there was only one regeneration partnership in each area, on a scale much smaller than those of the Regeneration Zones, Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder, or SRB6 project considered in this paper The outcome would be more on the scale of the Aston Pride New Deal for Communities. For this to happen, the Treasury would have to force central government departments to let go far more than hitherto. It is more likely that the present overlaps will continue.