As chief executive of innisfree and chairman of PPP forum, David Metter is at the heart of the theory and practice of the PFI. Innisfree, the private finance infrastructure company that Metter founded in 1995, is either bidding for or managing 60 projects with an overall capital value of £10bn. In a joint venture with Skanska, it was selected preferred bidder in December 2003 on the Barts and the Royal London hospitals - the biggest UK PFI hospital with a capital value of £1.8bn. He is clearly a motivated and sharp man. Sitting in Innisfree's offices near Fleet Street, which he shares with the PPP Forum, Metter first extols the virtues of PFI, offers a fairly rare and controversial view that perhaps bid costs are not all that bad, and says that the real issue is whether the government's schools targets are deliverable through the Local Education Partnership model. Metter, unsurprisingly, is a big fan of PFI. He was so frustrated by the bad publicity that private finance schemes attracted at the beginning of the decade that he founded the PPP Forum, so he and other private sector companies could join the debate. He has little time for the anti-PFI lobby: "Much of the criticism was politically driven in order to discredit the Labour party, and at that time the critics were little-known accountants, lawyers and academics."
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