Advisors have been useful, and to date, their fees have been modest

2.27  Several projects had made use of advisers to assist them with the benchmarking/market testing. Most had been appointed for a modest fee (ranging from a total of £7,000 to £30,000), and had secured between them the following benefits:

■  Commercial expertise.

■  Legal expertise.

■  Access to better quality data.

■  A reduction in time required for data collection and analysis.

■  A facilitator of the process.

For example, at Darent Valley Hospital, the advisers acted as a spokesperson for the Trust and had access to data sources which played an important part in the benchmarking. However, it is important that authorities should develop their role as an intelligent customer in this process (para 3.1), and before appointing advisers, evaluate the skills needed and whether these are available in-house.