A clear understanding of the government's requirements is fundamental to developing potentially winning bids. Consequently, it is important that proponents have both access to information and the opportunity to receive feedback on whether their bid meets the requirements of the output specification. Open interaction between the government project team and proponents, within appropriate probity parameters, is both necessary and desirable in terms of advancing project objectives.
All proponents must be given the same opportunity to access available commercial information and the same guidance on the conduct of the public private partnership process. Project information must be made available to eligible proponents, in the same form and at the same time. This is necessary to ensure that all proponents are equally informed of the government's requirements.
In order to ensure that information is distributed on a fair and equitable basis, the government project team should take steps, before the commencement of the competitive bid process, to establish sound internal processes for controlling and monitoring the flow of information to and from proponents. These procedures should be documented in the probity plan and may include:
• Contact points-a senior officer of the government project team should be nominated as the main contact point and be given the power to authorise others to communicate with proponents when required. Proponents should also be made aware of the procedures for obtaining information in relation to the project.
• Confidential discussions-all discussions with proponents, whether in person or over the phone, should be documented. As a general rule, all discussions will be treated confidentially. In this manner, proponents can freely discuss their proposals in detail, confident that their proprietary ideas will not be disclosed to others. If, as a result of these discussions, the government project team identifies a need to change the output specification or the project brief, the required changes only will be communicated to all proponents,
• Approving correspondence-procedures should be established for senior officers within the government project team to review and authorise correspondence to proponents, recognising the need to send consistent and internally agreed messages to all proponents. Subject to agency specific delegations of authority, day to day control of communication with proponents should rest with the government project team.
• Meetings with proponents-clear protocols need to be established to ensure that a consistent and coordinated approach is adopted by the government parties. Direct contact by other government agencies on bid-related matters should be avoided.
• Other contact - procedures should be established to ensure that site visits, data rooms, briefing sessions and other direct contact with proponents are handled in a way which affords all proponents the same opportunity to acquire information about the public private partnership process.
• Feedback and clarification - to ensure that the government receives quality, complying bids, proponents must be given equitable opportunity to present their bids and receive feedback on whether their bids align with the output specification. In all situations, the government must maintain confidentiality of any genuine intellectual property contained in proponents' bids. The content of discussions between the project team and a proponent will not be shared with other bidders. Unless there are changes to the output specification or project brief that all bidders need to be aware of, there will be no additional information relayed from the project team to bidders.
Proponents are likely to require more frequent discussions with the government project team in relation to projects where there may be innovative means of providing the specified outputs, or where there is to be some interdependency between services provided by the private party and core services provided by the agency. In this regard, it is imperative to ensure that proponents are given equitable access to feedback and clarification on bids. It is equally important to ensure that information provided by proponents relating to their proposed bids does not become available to any other proponent, whether directly or by inference. There must not be any cross fertilisation of Intellectual Property.
Feedback on a proponent's bid should focus on the capacity of the proposal to meet the output specification requirements. Detailed commentary can occur to explain the reasoning behind the feedback. Where the proposal clearly does not meet requirements, this should be brought to the bidder's attention by reference to a particular section of the output specification.
It is not the role of government officials to endorse, enhance or amend proposed solutions. Offering direction or explicitly leading a consortium is beyond the reasonable limit of the commentary. Compliance with the intent, letter and spirit of the output specification should be the focus of the commentary. A probity auditor should be available to the project team to provide assistance on specific plans and the proceedings of these meetings.
Any discussions or correspondence with a proponent should avoid providing any endorsement of specific commercial positions put forward by the proponent, its bid or any element thereof, until such time as binding decisions have been made within government on those matters.