I accept some economists hold variants of your position on PFI now...the point I'm making is at the time it was seen as ground-breaking as it enabled the public sector to increase spending on NHS with perceptibly half the risk. I also accept PFI is not a perfect solution; context is key, though.

People definitely criticised pfi in the 90s. And I was still reading private eye at the time they simply wouldn't stop banging on about how shitty a deal it was. And that it was stealth privitsation of public infrastructure. Fwiw a lot of keynsians would probably agree with me and that predates pfi