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Education
3:35 pm
Alex Neil (Scottish National Party)
I will in a minute. If Hugh Henry will let me finish my point, I will give him a chance.
Audit Scotland has assessed the impact of PPP on the cost of school building in Scotland over a 30-year period. It found that, compared with the traditional ways of funding capital projects in the public sector, the additional cost to the taxpayer over a 30-year period of using PPP was up to £134 million a year. Over 30 years, we will be paying up to £4 billion over the odds because of the PPP way of funding. Given the number of schools that we could build with £4 billion, I would argue that it would be far better not to use PPP but to use the traditional method of public sector funding. That would allow us to have all those extra schools.
I will let the minister in now.