This idea of innovation and efficiencies has been an important one put forward for public-private partnerships. I think you articulated the argument quite accurately: if you have the private sector at the table and they have an incentive to maintain the facility over an extended period of time, they'll make choices about what types of materials to use and how they design the facility.
One thing we've seen is that, at least in the value-for-money reports, where those efficiency gains are actually being achieved hasn't been clarified; we don't see which efficiencies are being brought forward that are considerably different from what happens through the public sector or through the conventional bidding process. Keep in mind that a conventional bidding process is still a competitive procurement, a design-build that you could still incentivize and in which you could still bring forward approaches to have the private sector designers come up with different approaches to deliver the infrastructure.
One thing we have seen with public-private partnerships is that when you have this long-term maintenance component around operations, the private sector will try to design the facility in a way that minimizes the risk of changes over time and makes it easiest to maintain. But that might not be the best facility for the public; the public might actually benefit from flexibility. In the 25- or 50-year life of the asset, the asset might change and the user's needs might actually change quite significantly. Yet if you have that contract for maintenance locked in, it can be very expensive to break it, even if there's a policy rationale for changing and building flexibility into the systems.
That's been part of the challenge around this long-term maintenance feature and the potential for policy lock-ins.