The process envisaged by the Authority should be cognisant of the CDP. This outline guidance does not attempt to provide definitive guidance on CDP and Authorities should satisfy themselves that nothing in their proposals for PBDFC would conflict with the requirements of CDP.
Under CDP the Authority may "request the participant identified as having submitted the most economically advantageous tender (the Preferred Bidder} to clarify aspects of the tender or confirm commitments contained in the tender, provided that this does not have the effect of modifying substantial aspects of the tender or of the call for tender and does not risk distorting competition or causing discrimination" 2 The introduction of CDP is therefore likely to severely curtail the possibility for post-PB negotiations. Consequently in order to avoid duplicating fully committed finance and extensive due diligence procedures for every bid, the Authority should consider the benefits of PBDFC and for those projects that match the criteria in Section 5.3, reduce the evaluation of finance for the PB selection stage to a binary pass/fail test.
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2 Paragraph 28 of Regulation 18 of the new Public Contracts Regulations 2006.