At the hearing you also requested a note setting out some details on the reason why St John's House Bootle PFI Benchmarking exercise took 25 months.
In fact, this is addressed by the NAO in paragraph 2.13 of their Report, which sets out that: "In the case of St John's House, Bootle, the benchmarking took 25 months as the public sector rejected the proposed 16 per cent increase in the price of services as this would have exceeded the cap on the services element portion of the quarterly Unitary Service Charge."
In addition, as table 16 indicated there was some difficulty in agreeing the comparative data for the benchmarking exercise, and this may have also contributed to the timescale.
It should be noted that the proposed 16% price increase was successfully opposed by the public sector and the final outcome was that there was no change in the price and no change to the services. As table 11 (p18) shows, the NAO's assessment of this outcome was that it was likely to have achieved value for money.