Roland mentioned "Save as you starv" and I agree that the Catering Retail and Leisure (CRL) contract has some significant shortfalls that need ironing out. However, I recently heard that significant "gain shares" (which is 50/50 dividend share to the station and contractor) have been delivered back to RAF stations - 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds - which they can spend on stuff on station for 'quality of life' improvements. Now if a little more was spent back on improving CRL and the price/food quality then I suspect it would find a happy median.
So I see no reason why PFI shouldn't work if we had some decent individuals doing contract monitoring and tweaking them to our benefit (ie. the Service). If the RAF did this we might gain another lever to pull and gain some control back from DIO or DE&S or this proposed GoCo.
LJ