8.22 As well as increasing procurement skills within the public sector, the Government believes that it is important that public sector managers are well advised, especially when undertaking complex procurement projects such as PFI. In the past, the difficulties which the public sector faces in acting like a single client, sharing experience and expertise and presenting a single face to the public sector, have hampered the public sector's ability to secure and make use of the best advice in a PFI project. Poor advice contributes to slowing the procurement process, can inflate procurement costs, and will impair the ability of the public sector to identify value for money in options appraisal and negotiation. In particular, there is a potential difficulty in a fragmented approach to securing advice because:
• the public sector cannot negotiate the best deal if it does not have the capacity to benchmark price and quality of advisors; and
• where the retention of advisers is undertaken in a fragmented 'one-off' fashion by the public sector, there is little potential to reward good advice with further work, and so ensure that advisors are incentivised to use their best people to provide support to a public authority.
8.23 It is also important that private sector advisers fully support the Government's approach to standardisation of contracts and appraisal including public sector comparators (see paragraphs) and that the appointment of such advisers takes full account of potential conflicts of interest.