The Standard Project Agreements have been developed against the background of a pipeline of accommodation investment plans involving both capital and revenue funding and at a time when public funds, whether capital or revenue, available for infrastructure investment are severely curtailed. They maintain the basic principles that:
• the private sector will provide the authority with serviced accommodation
• payment will only commence once the accommodation is complete and ready for use and
• the Authority will pay for available facilities and deductions will be made from the annual service payment if the facilities are not available or the services are otherwise not provided in accordance with the Authority's requirements.
Differences in operation between revenue funded facilities and facilities procured using conventional capital funding have been minimised as far as possible on the basis that, as far as possible, an Authority should be free to operate its revenue funded facilities in the same way as facilities provided using conventional capital funding and that good estate management practices should not depend on the financing route that was used to make the investment in the facilities. As such, the capital funded design and build contract used in hub closely resembles the construction elements of the Standard Project Agreements and a relatively narrow scope of hard facilities management services has been proposed for the Standard Project Agreements under which the private sector will provide planned maintenance (including lifecycle replacement) and reactive maintenance to the buildings and hard landscaping. In turn this should produce a simplified service specification and associated performance monitoring and contract management arrangements for Authorities.
SFT's approach has been:
• to promote maximum value for money through commercially reasonable risk transfer consistent with the principles outlined above;
• to adhere to the hub DBFM structure and NPD principles approved by Scottish Ministers;
• to simplify the documents as far as possible consistent with a robust commercial structure and financeability;
• to minimise transaction costs with a standard that should be reasonably acceptable by contractors, investors and funders as well as procuring authorities.