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A PPP for an empty building
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Still in the UK. Now, a hospital PPP. Large. Modern. Shiny. Hundreds of millions invested. Years of planning. Procurement. Financial close. Construction. Finally… The building was delivered. Or so everyone thought. The project was the Royal Liverpool University Hospital PFI project. New hospital. Supposed to open in 2017. There was only one small problem. The building could not be used. Fire safety defects. Structural issues. Incomplete works. Entire sections of the hospital had to be torn apart and rebuilt. Patients couldn’t move in. Doctors couldn’t operate. Beds remained empty. Meanwhile… The old hospital kept running. And taxpayers kept paying. The main contractor was Carillion… and now you should know that it collapsed in 2018. Which meant the government had to step in. Again. Years later… Millions more spent. Repairs. Legal battles. Investigations. The hospital finally opened in 2022. Five years late… Now when you hear PPP critics saying: “Private sector takes all the profit.” Reality is usually messier. Because when a PPP goes wrong… Everyone loses. Sponsors. Contractors. Government. Taxpayers. And sometimes the most important stakeholder of all: Patients waiting for a hospital bed. Infrastructure megaprojects are fragile things. You can have: Perfect financial models. Beautiful risk matrices. World-class advisors. But if construction quality fails… All the clever PowerPoint slides in the world won’t save the project. And the most expensive hospital in the city becomes… Just a very large empty building. More about these issues in the link below. ​The 100 Q&A You Must Know about PPPs​ PD 1: If you liked this email, don't keep it in secret and forward it to a friend. They will thank you enormously one day. PD 2: If somebody has sent you this email and you want to receive emails like this yourself, visit vicentevalencia.com PD 3: If you want unsubscribe, click the link below. |
Vicente Valencia
I talk about Personal Growth, Management, Infrastructure and More | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Everyone relaxes after the contract is signed. Lawyers celebrate. Sponsors shake hands. The press release goes out. “Landmark infrastructure project.” “World-class partnership.” “Long-term value for taxpayers.” Champagne. Photos. LinkedIn posts. Etc. In 2018 one of the largest PPP contractors in the UK, Carillion, collapsed overnight. Not struggling. Not restructuring. Collapsed. Gone. A tomar por cul0. The company was involved in dozens of PPP projects across the UK and beyond. Hospitals....
I hope you had not been in one of those… A meeting with a Power Point. Around 130 slides… Yes. One. Hundred. Thirty. Graphs. Tables. Appendices explaining the appendices. The speaker? Monotone. Boring. Like a GPS giving directions in the desert. A funeral seemed a fiesta in Ibiza. Slide 14… Slide 38… Slide 79… Around slide 92 something magical happened. One of the client directors fell asleep. Not metaphorically. Actually asleep. Head tilted. Eyes closed. The kind of sleep that says: “I’ve...
How you do anything is how you do everything. Leave something half-done or poorly executed and people assume the rest of your work looks exactly the same. Maybe that’s unfair.Maybe it’s not true. Doesn’t matter. That’s the perception on the other side of the table. If you don’t show leadership in a simple information meeting, why would anyone trust you to lead when the deal gets complicated? If you perform poorly once, what are the chances the other side believes the next time will be...