We used external consultants for two strands of work as part of the study. Our evaluation used in selecting the external consultants included full consideration of potential conflicts of interest.
Examination of contract clauses, carried out by Nabarro
We appointed, following a competition, Nabarro as legal consultants to use their PFI experience to review a sample of PFI contracts with provisions for benchmarking/market testing. They were asked to examine whether the provisions contain clauses which could be expected to test value for money. Nabarro's public sector team advises over 200 public sector clients and 100 local authorities. Appendix 2 has further information about their examination.
Consideration of the wider issues associated with benchmarking and market testing, carried out by Arup
We appointed Arup to carry out a programme of work which had been advertised to the eight professional firms which have been appointed as strategic partners to the National Audit Office. Their brief was to consider a series of issues we raised such as, whether sufficient comparable cost data is available to make benchmarking an effective means of value testing and whether markets exist for soft services to enable market testing to be an effective means of value testing. As well as expertise in property Arup has a wide range of experience relating to benchmarking/market testing working with Sony, the TUC and Toyota as well as experience with PFI soft services working as the banks' technical adviser for a number of PFI Hospitals and schools.