8.4.1 Payment for availability of the Service will vary according to each project. In accommodation projects, for example, accommodation should be allocated into "units'', the availability test will be applied to each unit and payment of the Unitary Charge will vary according to the number of "units" available. In other types of project, this approach may not be feasible and there may be a single availability test applied to the whole Service.
8.4.2 Where the Service is divided into areas, the financial consequences of unavailability of an area should depend on its level of criticality, as some areas will be critical to the provision of the Service whilst others will be less so.
8.4.3 The Contract must therefore specify which areas are most important (i.e. core to the Service) and allocate them a higher weighting (i.e. make a greater deduction from the Unitary Charge if they are unavailable). For example, in hospitals, accommodation is often grouped into three areas: the most important area includes accident and emergency facilities and patient spaces including bathrooms, operating theatres and intensive care; the area of medium importance includes general waiting areas and clinical support areas such as pharmacy, physiotherapy and chiropody, and the least important areas are office areas and educational facilities.
8.4.4 The effect of weighting can also be achieved through or in conjunction with other means, for example, by allowing shorter rectification periods for key areas before the Contractor suffers deductions.148
8.4.5 The calibration of the payment mechanism and weightings of deductions is discussed further in Section 7.5.
_________________________________________________________________
148 By way of further example, subjecting every individual room in an accommodation project to an availability deduction will tend to lead to lower deductions than having the same overall weighting but arranging rooms in functional pairs and giving a deduction of twice the size for either (or both) member(s) of a pair becoming unavailable: the first occurrence of unavailability will in the latter case immediately lead to twice the level of deduction, although the subsequent unavailability of the other half of the pair will put the Contractor in the same position as had each room been assessed individually. A similar system is to define "consequential unavailability" where the unavailability of one room leads to that of another.