If you are waiting for a new school, don't hold your breath. Some 200 of them are supposed to be under construction around Scotland by the 2011 election, but the way things look now, the builders won't move in much before then.

If you are waiting for a new school, don't hold your breath. Some 200 of them are supposed to be under construction around Scotland by the 2011 election, but the way things look now, the builders won't move in much before then.

The problem is a fog of confusion over the SNP government's much-vaunted plans for a better way of funding public projects.

The case was simple. The Tory-started private finance initiative (PFI) or its Labour successor, public private partnerships (PPP), were deemed too costly, unresponsive, profiteering and out of the public's control. Labour's response was lame: "Well, you've got a new school, haven't you? Who cares how much it's costing you? Indeed, who cares if you can't even tell how much it's costing? It's there, so be grateful."

In opposition, the SNP trumpeted the case against. It went on to tell us that it would end PPP, then clarifying that it would "crowd out" PPP eventually. Alex Salmond's brainy advisers had crunched the numbers, we were assured, and the new funding vehicle would soon be recycling profits back into the public realm rather than big, bad capitalists.

But then the SNP decided capitalists are just fine. It figured that the profit motive will achieve its primary objective of boosting Scotland's growth rate. So the two policies sit side by side: cut taxes and trust the private sector to invest for growth, but don't trust businesses anywhere near public services. While the SNP seems content to live with that tension, its plans for an alternative to PPP are as lame as Labour's previous justification of it. Just before Christmas, while the world partied, St Andrew's House quietly published a plan, which sort of meandered round the issues.

It proposed the creation of a Scottish Futures Trust (SFT), private enough to attract private finance and public enough in ethos. It could build and lease public facilities, it could raise the funds for others to do so, it could merely advise, or it could try to do all these. Any profits could go to public benefit, and by being large and with government backing, it could be cheaper. Responses were published late last Friday - another good time to bury bad news, and no wonder. It is not that the responses were damning. Several share the desire to end PPP. The problem was more a widespread bewilderment. Finance experts were struggling to find something helpful to say. At its conference this weekend, the SNP was delighted to highlight one Labour-run council, East Renfrewshire, offering to pilot the plan, but neglected to say that Eastwood's financiers seem to think they can do better than St Andrew's House.

Some merely look forward to proposals worth commenting on; Universities Scotland, for instance, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants. The Institute of Public Finance Accountants could merely point out "significant gaps" and that "further, fundamental questions remain to be asked or addressed".

Audit Scotland, the public sector watchdog, observed the SFT "faces competing challenges and constraints and these create a number of risks". The plan is "at a very early stage and there is much further work to be done", including the question of public accountability. Several highlight that PPP has changed in recent years: the gap between interest on public and private finance has been squeezed, and it is unlikely the SFT can cut it much further. They point out Holyrood has no powers to use bonds to raise capital, as the plan suggests, hinting at potential legal uncertainty that is hardly likely to attract financiers.

Raising capital, after all, is not easy in these credit-crunching days, and while the International Project Finance Association might be easily dismissed as the voice of the PPP industry, it offers a warning there is global competition for this kind of money: if Scotland wants its projects to be less profitable, slower, more expensive to bid or "private sector unfriendly", the money will simply go elsewhere. And all the while, public services, parents, pupils and patients watch and wait. The SNP has signed off the PPP projects that were under way before it was elected. But other parts of public Scotland are holding off new projects while uncertainty reigns over the administration's funding plans.

There is a theme here. While the SNP administration is hitting the easy buttons, from prescription charges to council tax freezes, the three big ticket items of its first year in office have been notable for their lack of detail. Its constitutional white paper offered familiar assertions about the benefits of Scotland leaving the UK, but no data or risk assessment. As a worked-out policy, the local income tax is barely serious, leaving conspicuous gaps and doubts about the reliability of the few figures in it.

So if there is one challenge for the SNP in its second year, it is to start getting the big items right. It does the politics well, but government is tougher than it looked from the outside, and the big picture requires attention to detail.