THE British public will eventually pay about #53m for a bridge that was supposed to be privately financed, writes David Ross, Highland Correspondent.
That is the conclusion of the Public Accounts Committee, which said that the Scottish Office and the Treasury did not properly protect UK taxpayers and bridge toll-payers interests when pursuing the Skye bridge project.
The figure includes the loss of CalMac ferry profits.
Later today, the Treasury will publish the Government's official response to the PAC report. This will concede that as the Tory-controlled Scottish Office was determined to secure the flagship PFI bridge project, the taxpayer and toll payer were not guaranteed best value for their money.
It is understood, however, that there is no official acceptance of the PAC's conclusion that the financial terms of the Skye bridge deal were not fully satisfactory because they were not determined competitively. This is despite equity investors receiving a real rate of return of 18.4% a year.
But the concessions are highly significant and are bound to lead to renewed calls for Scottish Office civil servants and former Ministers responsible to be called to account, and for a new public inquiry. The defence of the financing of the project, meanwhile, will outrage campaigners.
The PAC published its report in June, which followed the National Audit Office investigation published in May last year. One of the committee's most damning criticisms was on ''value for money''.
It stated: ''The Department (Scottish Office) decided against calculating a public sector comparator for this project on the grounds that such a comparison would have been false and misleading since they had no intention of funding the Skye bridge except as a privately financed project.''
The committee concluded that, in the absence of a public sector comparison, ''a question mark must remain over the extent of value for money obtained by the taxpayer and the toll payer from this project'', and having selected in April 1991 the Miller/Dywidag consortium to build the bridge, there was no ''competitive tension''.
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