3.10 The Treasury has commented in its most recent assessment of PFI that procuring authorities are not allocating sufficient time and resources to adequately prepare and develop their projects before formal engagement with the market.18 Many professional advisers we spoke to believed that more preparation would help to prevent large-scale changes to projects or unplanned extra rounds of tendering, both of which were seen as major reasons for tendering delays. Two-thirds of procuring authorities that closed projects between April 2004 and May 2006 made scope or specification changes to their projects after going to the market.
3.11 The amount of pre-tendering preparation by authorities varied between around five months and nearly five years.19 There was no correlation between preparation time and size of deal; nor was there a significant correlation between preparation time and the subsequent length of the tendering process. In the latter case, this may partly reflect the fact that lengthy preparation periods were not always focused or backed with sufficient resources and levels of experience.
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18 Strengthening long-term partnerships, p103.
19 We calculated this from the date of project initiation, defined as the point at which the decision was taken to begin the substantive work towards Outline Business Case.