3.5 The Treasury issued new guidance in October 2006. This takes into account research which it commissioned from PUK during the spring/summer 2006 into the early experiences of projects that had benchmarked or market tested. We have also shared our findings from this study with the Treasury and were consulted by the Treasury as it developed its guidance. The Treasury also took account of work by the Department of Health who, in conjunction with the PPP Forum, produced a code of practice entitled 'benchmarking and market testing in NHS PFI projects' in June 2006.
3.6 Although the detailed Treasury guidance was not available to the 11 PFI projects we examined, it offers advice on the issues we uncovered in our study and will provide support to the increasing number of PFI projects about to undertake the value testing process. The value of services which will be subject to value testing is expected to grow significantly in the next few years. The annual value of the services tested in the building projects examined by the NAO which had value tested by 2006 was £27 million.9 The value of services being value tested will grow substantially over the next five years. Of the 500 PFI projects in the operational phase at least half have value testing provisions in their contracts.
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9 Derived from individual project data in Figure 15, page 24.