Three facts opened the conversation. The maintenance backlog on the critical structures of Dutch infrastructure is estimated at somewhere between thirty and eighty billion euros, depending on how you count. A railway line that most people think should be built cannot be made to fit the national planning and budgeting system. And Rijkswaterstaat has not tendered a new DBFM contract in years, while the DBFM roads that exist are, by common consent, in excellent condition.
Why discuss this in a podcast about building without disputes? Because who finances a project, which risks come with that money, and over what horizon, determines which contract is signed, how it is procured, and therefore which disputes will and will not arise. Financing design is dispute design. And when nothing is financed at all, the dispute arrives anyway: the day trucks are banned from a bridge, deferred maintenance becomes emergency work, and emergency work, with its unclear scope, time pressure and opposed interests, is the perfect cocktail for a dispute.
My guests were Jan van Schoonhoven, former naval officer, former director of PPP at Rijkswaterstaat, later at UNECE in Geneva and the EBRD in London, and now with the National Center for Privatization and PPP in Saudi Arabia; and Leon Hombergen, senior adviser on innovation and markets at Rijkswaterstaat, assistant professor at TU Delft, and a local politician in Delft. I had promised to play the sceptic. I did not have to try very hard, because they did it for each other.
The tension, stated plainly
Jan's position, in my words: the backlog can be solved with well-organised financing, PPP included, and the discipline that comes with it. Leon's position: private finance is an expensive instrument, and most of the gain is available without it, if the State puts the road on a balance sheet and manages it, as an owner, over many years.
They agreed on the diagnosis before they disagreed on the cure. The Dutch budget system is a cash-and-commitments system that forces optimisation within a single year, while the real gains in whole-life cost are made over twenty-five. Scope becomes short of breath, variations become routine, and problems pile up until they surface as an emergency. Both had watched the Netherlands slip, on the World Economic Forum's infrastructure ranking, from near the top fifteen years ago to seventeenth today.
Leon's answer is the balance sheet. The Netherlands, unlike most of its neighbours, has no balance sheet of its infrastructure on which depreciation and improvement can be read. He does not want the Delta Works on the national accounts, and he understands why the Ministry of Finance never did either; but a shadow balance sheet, kept by the infrastructure ministry, would make visible what everyone knows and nobody records: that the country is slowly consuming its assets. Jan's answer is to think like an investor. Good infrastructure contributes to growth; at two per cent a year a DBFM programme roughly pays for itself, at four it makes money, and the cost of one closed bridge, counted per day, changes the arithmetic further. His plea is for an infrastructure fund that sits outside the annual budget but pays interest and repays capital, and for the courage to argue that case with the Ministry of Finance.
Where the model earns its keep, and where it does not
I put to Leon the argument that private finance is worth its price: in a DBFM the interests are aligned, the banks bring their discipline, and the availability regime keeps everyone honest; when the State does it itself, the contractor disputes return. He conceded the point and added two qualifications that I think are right. First, on the DBFM projects that went badly, the contractors bore the pain, and the Netherlands needs a construction market that survives its own contracts. Second, a twenty-five-year contract freezes the technical requirements of year one; when the standards for waste water or road safety move in year fifteen, the public client is in a one-to-one negotiation with no leverage. The model works, and it is largely self-steering, but the public party must remain in control.
Jan added the lesson from Saudi Arabia, and it is not the one people expect. The country's GDP and its finance ministry's budget are of the same order as the Dutch; the mega-projects are financed by the sovereign fund, not the budget. What is different is the business case: every project is assessed for its contribution to the economy before the financing question is asked, and financiers sit at the table from the start alongside builders, developers and advisers. Not always as a PPP, but always as an informed choice. His warning for the Netherlands is the British one: commit too large a share of the annual budget to long contracts and in ten years the next government has no room left to move.
What I took from it
Two lessons, both of which went into my presentation in Sofia a week later. First: keep a balance sheet of your assets, even a shadow one, so that maintenance is a visible obligation and not a budget residue. The infrastructure debt does not appear in the public debt figures, but it is real, and it is where the next generation of disputes is being manufactured. Second: in a PPP the financiers lead, not the builders, and the availability regime resolves most issues inside the financier-and-contractor triangle before they ever reach the State. That discipline is the model's virtue. Its price is flexibility, and a country must decide how much of tomorrow's budget it is willing to commit today.
Jan and Leon parted with a joke about founding a political party. I suspect they would agree on its programme: a longer horizon, an investment fund, a shadow balance sheet, and a budget system that stops punishing the people who maintain things. Whether the money is public or private came a distant second.
Bouwen met Vertrouwen is the podcast of Presolve, the centre of expertise for dispute-free construction. Building with Trust, its English edition, starts at the end of September 2026 with an episode recorded in Lima.