18 A good partnership relationship is one where both sides are open, share information fully and work together to solve problems. It is not easy to secure this form of relationship and there are challenges to authorities and contractors in achieving this in PFI projects.
19 In our survey, two thirds of contractors thought their relationship with authorities worked in an open and trustworthy environment most or all of the time. But some projects had clearly suffered from a lack of openness or poor communications. Some projects had successfully co-located authority and contractor staff to improve communications and to identify and deal with problems more quickly.
20 The responses to our surveys showed the following experiences of how aspects of the relationship between authorities and contractors have been working in practice:
Governance arrangements - PFI contracts include a range of governance arrangements dealing with how performance will be monitored, problems resolved and new services or other changes dealt with. Most authorities and contractors considered that governance arrangements were working well.
Innovation - Although most contractors said their contracts had given them scope to be innovative, some contractors who had high expectations of prospects for innovation found they were less able to be innovative than they had initially anticipated. They attributed this to departments having fixed views on design features or other aspects of how the service should be provided. Most authorities considered their contractors had been partially innovative in taking projects forward.
Authorities' monitoring of contractors' performance - Authorities need to ensure that contractors are providing accurate and valid performance data. Three quarters of contractors thought authorities had adopted an appropriate approach to monitoring their performance. Some contractors, however, felt their relationship with the authority had suffered as a result of the authority becoming too closely involved in performance monitoring.
Reassessment and review of the relationship - Authorities and contractors need to review their relationships on a regular basis to establish how they can be improved and maintained. A number of authorities and contractors had done this, for example by holding an away day or other form of joint event.