Study title

This data collection consists of semi-structured interviews with residents, politicians, consultants and practitioners about experiences of public housing regeneration under Private Finance Initiatives in England. The interviews took place between 2011 and 2014. The residents were drawn from both tenants and leaseholders either living in homes or estates subject to PFI regeneration schemes, or representing those residents as officials of tenants and residents associations or other formal structures. Other interviews include local councillors, housing officers, and consultants with a direct role in housing PFI schemes.

For the past 20 years, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has been a major policy approach to investing in public services. Put simply, PFI usually involves a private sector consortium winning a long-term contract to design, privately finance and build new hospitals or prisons and then assume their long-term management and maintenance. This radical change to public service delivery is highly controversial with competing claims about PFI's purpose, impact and effectiveness. Existing research has so far largely ignored PFI's growing role in public housing, leaving the potential implications of PFI for people, place and local governance relatively unknown. This project responds to this gap by examining and evaluating the use of PFI in the regeneration of council housing estates in England. It investigates the competing claims about PFI's purpose and effectiveness between government and residents on the ground, and the unique dual identity of residents (tenants and leaseholders) as both housing service users and dwellers. The project assesses how PFI transforms public housing as a place, a residential community, and as a democratically governed public service. Above all, it is concerned with residents "lived experience" of PFI - what it means to them in their everyday lives.