Public Private Partnership – Partnerství veřejného a soukromého sektoru

The notion of PPP (Public Private Partnership) is generally describing a wider group of projects, in which both the private and the public sector participate, and which aim at satisfying services traditionally supplied by the public sector. PPP generally refer to cooperation of public administration bodies and the enterprise sector for the purpose of providing finances, construction, reconstruction, administration or public infrastructure administration or public service supply.

During the last decade, PPP developed in many public sector branches. The PPP model is based on Great Britain, where this method has been successfully used since 1992. The method proved useful in other countries, too, e.g. in Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, USA, Canada, Japan and Australia. Various factors can reason the increasing use of PPP, e.g. due to budget restrictions, to which the countries are exposed, PPP brings necessary financing of the public sector from private sources. Another requirement is for the public sphere to gain a better profit from the know-how and the procedure applied in the private sector. PPP development is also part of a general transition of the economic role of the state from a direct operator to an organizer, regulator and control executor.

PPP projects are usually characterized with the following steps:

• Relatively long-term relationship concerning the cooperation of public and private partners on various aspects of the planned project
• The method of project financing – partially by the private sector – sometimes by means of difficult agreements between various parties. Public means
• Important role of an economic operator, who participates in various project phases (design, implementation, construction, financing). Public partner mainly concentrates on defining goals, which are necessary to achieve with regard to the public interest aspect, quality of provided services and price policy, and overtakes the responsibility to supervise, whether they are kept.
• Distribution of risks between the public and the private partners, to whom the risks are transferred, which are usually taken by the public partner. However, PPP does not have to necessarily mean that the private partner took all risks associated with the project or their substantial part. From case to case, the actual distribution of risk is determined according to the possibility of the participating parties to evaluate the risk, control it and deal with it.