This book provides an overview of the practices and policies associated with public private partnerships in contemporary Britain. Based on original empirical research by a multidisciplinary team of academics, the book examines how Partnership, realised through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and wider mechanisms of Public Private Partnership (PPP), is re-shaping service provision and governance in the UK. This book lays out a series of inter-related case studies which explore different facets of the contemporary partnership phenomenon, and contextualises these developments within a broader analysis of the driving forces behind this important policy agenda. Acknowledging the pivotal role of partnership in the New Labour project, this book seeks to fill an existing gap in the literature which has arisen due to a dearth of studies which evaluate the early and ongoing experiments in PFI and PPP. At this stage in the development of PFI and PPP a sufficient number of projects have been completed to allow for the unique problems and difficulties associated with PFI to be assessed on an evidence basis. However, much of the literature on PFI continues to focus on theoretical issues which are largely unrelated to the contemporary practices of partnership based procurement and service delivery.