The Scottish Executive should consider holding some cost benchmarking data centrally to support contract managers involved in benchmarking or market testing exercises (e.g. on the input costs for soft FM).
In general though, we do not recommend that the procurement and construction database is extended to collect operational data at this stage.
Rather, we recommend that the Scottish Executive commissions sector specific studies to assess the relative operational performance of PPP projects. Depending on the level of resources that the Scottish Executive is able and willing to allocate to this, we suggest that this further work might include some / or all of the following three elements:
• A periodic audit of all PFI schemes (say every five years) along the lines of the current work - but also looking in detail at a smaller number of projects within a particular sector.
• Commission detailed studies into some of the specific components of PPP contracts identified in this Study.
• Commission sector specific studies that seek to compare performance across PPP and non-PPP contracts. We recommend that the Scottish Executive might consider carrying out a further, ongoing evaluation of PPP and non-PPP schools - building on the work carried out by Audit Scotland. If possible, this study should involve the identification of small number of standardised performance indicators and cost data that could be collected over time, and be used in a full comparative efficiency analysis of the sample projects.