Research And Reference On UK's PFI/PPP Legal Framework

Private finance initiative (PFI)/Public private partnerships (PPPs) are arrangements typified by joint working between the public and private sector. Where delivery of public services involves private sector investment in infrastructure, the most common form of PPP is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). PFI was first lunched in the United Kingdom with the aim of increasing the involvement of the private sector in the provision of public services, and UK keeps the leading status in this field since then. PFI and its variants have now been adopted in many countries as part of the wider neo-liberal program of privatisation and financialisation driven by corporations, national governments, and international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.Though there is no corresponding concept of PFI/PPP in China's legal system, private sector has been involved in various infrastructure for more than ten years starts from the first foreign invested power station BOT project in 1984. After 2000 topics in relation to PFI/PPP began to draw a lot of attention, Chinese experts in law wrote a lot of papers in relation to how to build China's PFI/PPP legal framework. However, existing research mainly focus on how to identify the shortcomings of current laws and regulations and suggestions tend to be limited to very high level principles.This article primarily focuses on UK's PFI/PPP legal and regulatory framework, especially its competitive dialogue procedure set forth in the Public Contracts Regulations and the Utilities Contracts Regulations. Based on a detailed research on UK's PFI/PPP legal and regulatory framework, this article further sets out the meaningful implications, especially from a practical perspective, to China's PFI/PPP legal and regulatory system.