Tag: Global

Reflection by Christopher McClinton, Part-Time MBA Class of 2019

London First Impressions

Upon arriving at Heathrow a visitor to London gets the impression that he or she might there have a fully immersive international experience without leaving the airport. Some disruptions to my itinerary resulted in an unplanned and hurried dash across multiple terminals in order to catch my flight. Despite my travel anxiety, I had infrastructure on the brain and couldn’t help but marvel at the intersection of so much transport, commerce, culture, and public utility in one space. Whatever metropolis the rails leaving the airport led to seemed momentarily like a mere adornment for the real urban epicenter which was Heathrow itself. For all of the divergent opinions I would hear over the course of the next week about the efficacy of British rail and transport I was massively impressed with the Tube. Twenty‐one stops, one line change, and less than an hour later I was standing on Marylebone a block from the hotel. I would learn a lot over the next week, but among the first things I learned from Anne‐Marie (our tour guide) was that Henry VIII upon seizing the church’s land to be his personal hunting grounds unwittingly made a huge contribution to present day London’s urban planning. The park is vast and beautiful, and like Central Park in New York is a vital green space in a dense urban area. Our hotel was right next to it and all of the students appreciated that.

Learnings

The impression that the UK is a deeply divided populace ideologically speaking is the most enduring lesson learned from my trip. I think it was a remarkable experience for the GW students to be in London just months before its divorce from the EU takes effect on March 29th, 2019. In the two years since the referendum we learned that basic questions relating to borders, immigration, trade polices with the EU have yet to be resolved, yet the country is hurtling towards that deadline with unknown consequences beyond it. During our visit with Lord Knight, who seemed deeply distraught over the future of England post‐Brexit, it was pointed out that the whole question of the border with Ireland, which will remain in the EU, has not been resolved and has no practical resolution. I was struck by how many similar and sensitive issues ranging from trade to labor mobility must not have been fully contemplated at the time of the referendum. The disdain that some of our speakers had for the ‘London‐centric’, a term seemingly deployed as a pejorative, was initially surprising but echoed some of the rhetoric that is commonly heard regarding attitudes toward the ‘elites’ in our country. From my perspective, the debate between the conservative and labor party in Parliament bears much resemblance to the highly partisan debates in the US as they pertain to immigration and trade today. In some ways, the focus of much of our course (whether certain enterprises are better managed by the public or private sector) parallels the on‐going debate over Brexit. In both debates there appear to be two firmly entrenched ideological camps with Conservatives in favor of Brexit and privatization and Labour preferring to remain in the EU and generally backing nationalization policies.

While Brexit, immigration, and privatization vs. SOE debates seemed to be highly divisive topics for the country, it was my observation that there were also some countervailing forces at work that served to unify the country. Since we were in England when they were playing Colombia in the World Cup round of 16, I went to a pub to watch the people as much as the game, eager to sample the culture in what I thought would be an authentic encounter with English culture. At the Prince Regent at the corner of High Street and Nottingham I found what I was looking for and thoroughly enjoyed rooting for the ‘lads’ alongside all stripes of Londoners with the game ending in a thrilling penalty shootout. Another unifying element that I noted during my visit was the National Health Service, which was celebrating its 70th anniversary. What was interesting to me is that, while not everyone thought the system was perfect, there seemed to be a shared sense of pride about what it had made possible for the English citizens. Individuals with whom I spoke would point out its shortcomings, but I don’t recall speaking to a single person that didn’t think it was serving an important societal purpose. Another element of unity that I observed was the pride the people of London showed in the RAF, which prior to our visit had just celebrated its 100th anniversary. A final point of shared optimism seemed to arise from the recent royal wedding of Prince Harry to an American woman that seems to have found favor with the British public. These were welcome, if fleeting, elements of shared optimism in an atmosphere that has lately been marked by fear and uncertainty over what Brexit will mean for the future of the UK.

Our on‐campus analysis of the PPP model and the Special Purpose Vehicle that is formed to contract with the public sector, assemble the sub‐contractors, and deliver the service was reinforced during our meeting with Transport for London (TfL). For me personally, it was during this meeting, and specifically during the discussion with Jenny Barber and Nicola Cox, that there was a meaningful connection between the more abstract material discussed in class and real world implementation of the risk transfer and pay‐for‐value framework. In particular, it was very instructive for me to learn the detail of how the Silvertown Tunnel project was actually tendered and financed, as it was the most concrete example of PPP project financing we’ve seen. Her project also illustrated how risk transfer was accomplished by creating a revenue stream based upon an availability payment formula that ensured TfL was paying for performance, even while retaining the ability to set the fares. Further, and consistent with our readings, the financing structure for Silvertown removed the asset from TfL’s balance sheet, converting the payment stream to operational expense instead of capital expense. What remains unclear to me is how the risk is transfer is ever complete so long as the UK government is perceived to be implicitly backstopping the entire project. As Nicola noted, an SVP involved in a recent PPP with TfL miscalculated the ridership fees (due to students riding free) on which it depended for revenue, resulting in a loan default. This in turn obliged TfL to step in and guarantee and refinance the loans, suggesting that the off balance sheet exercise is not entirely off balance sheet.

After TfL, I found the meeting most relevant to our course to be the time spent with Office for Rail and Road (ORR). In our campus course we read and heard from speakers (Wooten) about the challenges of trying to replicate competition with natural monopolies. As Carl Hetherington stated, the ORR’s job is to regulate competition and rail performance. This for me was the most tangible example of the intersection of business and the state, with licensed operators and open access operators competing for rail time. I found it interesting to hear about how their NPAT (Not Primarily Abstractive Test) was used to balance competition with use of the Secretary of Treasury’s funds. Carl’s team was also extremely well prepared and generous with their time. Though her presentation was not so much related to our course topics I found Sarah Carlson to be extremely impressive and I greatly appreciated the insights she shared into the process for rating sovereign debt. I left the Moody offices thinking that outside of the Fed Open Market Committee hers was arguably one of the most influential in the world economy.

Recommendations

One of the most rewarding parts of trip for me was the opportunity to get to know the other students. For many students in the PMBA programs that juggle full‐time jobs, families, and course work there is typically little time for socializing and networking with other students. Looking back, it’s interesting to see how little interaction there was among us during the campus portion of our course. Traveling together created a completely different and more collaborative dynamic with lots of ideas exchanged on both personal and professional levels. One drawback to the tight‐knit group we became was that we may not have fully taken advantage of the chance to interact with locals. I would caution future participants about this tendency and encourage them to explore the city on their own.

The trip itinerary struck a good balance between lectures and allowing for time to experience London and its surroundings. I thought the day trips to Winchester and Cambridge were also a great addition to the itinerary. On the whole, this summer program has enriched my graduate experience at GW and I’m glad for having participated.

Reflection by Luke Lisell, Professional Cohort MBA Class of 2018

Reflecting on the time that I spent in London while participating in the Privatization, Nationalization, and Public Private Partnerships study abroad course, I believe that I learned a great deal. Some of my previously held beliefs were reinforced by what I heard and saw on the trip, and overall, I found that conditions in the United Kingdom were different from my expectations based on our pre-trip studies. I was also pleasantly surprised by the high caliber of my fellow participants and the broad cross-section of backgrounds that they represented.  Never at a loss for words or questions, I thought our group engaged well with each presenter and I enjoyed the Q&A sessions because I felt that we collectively drove the discussions forward with strong multi-disciplinary insights. I departed the United States expecting to hear full throated endorsements of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) from a series of experts engaged in fully exploiting and leveraging their possibilities. What I found instead was a pragmatic group of advisors and practitioners worried about public perception and political backlash. These individuals struggled at times to find artful ways to talk about public-private collaborations following years of negative coverage of failed projects in the national press.

As for individual presenters, I felt that Lieutenant Colonel Edward Waite-Roberts was an effective speaker and that his brief was beneficial at the beginning of the schedule. I appreciated the fact that he allocated time to give us deep background information on current British politics, Brexit, and the fallout from the Grenfell housing complex fire. I had specifically followed the international press coverage of the Grenfell tower fire last year, and incorrectly assumed that the incident was a distant memory for most members of the British public.  What Lt. Col Wait-Robert’s expert analysis made me realize was that this remains a hot button topic and generally fit the narrative, in the press and in the minds of an outraged British public, of the two opposing forces battling for supremacy in a decades-long fight in post-privatization Britain. The first of these antagonists could be called the ‘greedy private sector’ consisting of business people who cut corners to ensure higher returns and the second character being public regulators frequently found to be falling down on the job and generally doing an inadequate job protecting public interests.  I felt like this was very important context as we started our investigations into Privatization and Public Private Partnerships in the United Kingdom.

I also felt that Lord Jim Knight was a particularly interesting and effective speaker, and the luncheon at Osteria was an agreeable and appropriate setting to have a candid discussion. Lord Knight spent considerable time describing Brexit from the perspective of a senior Labour party politician, while tangentially explaining British political and educational structures that he correctly assessed to be difficult material for Americans to fully grasp. I found it fascinating that he counted the excesses of the Thatcher government and its aggressive privatization policies as the impetus for him to enter local politics in the late 1980’s. Fast forward to the early 2000’s, Lord Knight served in Tony Blair’s cabinet, as an undersecretary in the MoD during the early years of the Global War on Terror, in a Labour government with a strong track record of foreign military interventions and PFI deals. My instincts, based on US politics, would be that Lord Knight’s left-leaning Labour politics would be much less hawkish and more pro-international trade.  What instead appears to be the case is that some members of his Labour party are the voices in British society that are pushing to roll back some past PPP and PFI deals that were cut during the early days of the Blair government as well as the re-nationalization of the rail system.  This was an excellent illustration for me that local politics matter immensely for any party interested in executing long-term infrastructure or service delivery contracts with foreign governments. It is worth the effort to understand the local political environment but even that is not a bulletproof strategy as political winds may shift over time as illustrated by the current Labour government reversing some of its previous policies.

A third presentation that I felt was excellent was “Team Swansea” consisting of Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Carolyn Harris representing Swansea East and Professor Simon Brooks representing Swansea School of Management at Swansea University. MP Harris, besides being a gifted, natural orator with a profound sense of humor, did a wonderful job describing a very different corner of the United Kingdom than what we had come to expect during our tours of London and the wealthy surrounding counties. She painted a visceral picture of a post-industrial corner of Wales that was struggling to catch up after globalization shifted jobs out of the region. She and professor Brooks touched on the politics of devolution, the process designed in the late 1990’s to decentralize Great Britain’s government and give more power to the three nations which, together with England, makeup the UK. It was only after discussions with “Team Swansea” and others that I began to realize just how London centric and centrally controlled the UK governance was in the past and remains by many economic measures to this day. Wales only recently begun benefiting from the devolution policies, whereby it 1) retains greater control of tax revenues generated on its lands and 2) the locally elected Welsh Assembly appropriates those funds. Both speakers made it clear however that due to the relatively small population and industrial tax base of the country, public coiffures are insufficient to fund all the activities of local government. My impression following “Team Swansea’s” presentation was that, despite a consensus nationally that PFI’s and PPP’s had fallen out of favor among Labour party leadership, there is still a need for public private partnerships and private financing in public projects in Swansea and other similarly affected municipalities. In a chicken and egg fashion, post-industrial corners of the UK are looking for investment in public infrastructure to attract knowledge workers, entrepreneurs, and the companies that will help them climb out of the economic doldrums and begin a virtuous cycle of investment. At present however, PPPs and PFIs or versions thereof appear to be one of the few vehicles available to these rural communities that lack sufficient internal means to self-finance critical infrastructure and services.

I think that Professor David Newbery’s lecture would have been even more beneficial at an earlier position on the schedule. I thought he did an excellent job outlining the history of privatization in the United Kingdom, providing some UK specific context to the entire Privatization and Public Private Partnership discussion, and explaining the British vision of privatizing and restructuring. He carefully walked us through a case study of the network utility privatization and the structural remedies that they emplaced to create competition where feasible, and regulation to mimic competition where not. This would’ve been good context to have going into our meeting with the Office of Rail and Road (ORR). The gentlemen at ORR did a marvelous job explaining the intricacies of their job and were more than generous with their time, but the entire discussion would’ve been more effective if we had previously sat through professor Newbery’s lecture.

During our time in Winchester City, while touring the grounds of the beautiful Winchester Cathedral and the 13th century “public” school located within the constellation of outlying buildings, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Waite-Roberts said something that struck me. He commented that, “Just when you think you begin to understand this country, it will surprise you.” He was referring to the English practice of using the term “public” school to refer to the nation’s oldest, most prestigious, expensive, and exclusive learning institutions. I believe that a larger argument could be made, however regarding Britain and the United States’ understanding of each other. While the two countries appear to have very similar cultures with a long-shared history, there remains a significant gulf of understanding separating the two nations and their people. In my humble opinion, it was very helpful and beneficial to spend time touring and speaking with British advisors and practitioners of Privatization, Nationalization, and Public Private Partnerships to bridge this gap, albeit in a very specific quarter. As I mentioned in the intro, some of my previously held beliefs were reinforced by what I heard and saw, but overall, I found that conditions in the United Kingdom were quite different than what I had expected to find based on our pre-trip studies and my personal pre-formed ideas. My colleagues’ strong multi-disciplinary insights aided me immensely in breaking through some of these tricky cultural and historical distortions and ultimately, I would fully endorse this trip to any MBA student who had interest in public private collaboration.