Silvertown Tunnel: When You Can’t Afford It, Just Get Someone Else to Pay

As of Monday, East London got itself a shiny new tunnel. Not because TfL stumbled across a suitcase of cash on a Jubilee line train, but because someone else - namely, a group of investors and lenders with a taste for long term toll forecasts - agreed to foot the bill.

The Silvertown Tunnel is a textbook example of a Public–Private Partnership, or PPP. For the uninitiated, that's the financial equivalent of saying, “We’ll take the infrastructure now, and worry about the bill for the next 25 years.”