2.1 The Home Office recruited good quality staff to the project team with relevant experience. The project director was an experienced property specialist and the project manager had worked previously on the PFI deal to redevelop the Ministry of Defence's Whitehall estate. A senior project manager was brought in from the Office of Government Commerce to focus on implementing the Project Agreement; this manager came from a construction background with experience in managing major projects. The winning consortium, AGP found it easier to work with members of the Home Office project team who had a detailed understanding of the technical and construction issues involved in developing the Marsham Street site.
2.2 Good quality advisers were employed by the Home Office following a competitive procurement process. Figure 6 records the costs incurred by the leading advisers. In the context of the prolonged procurement process, we consider that the costs incurred were reasonable: the additional round of bidding required further input from the specialist advisers in terms of evaluating the revised bids; and delays in reaching final agreement with the preferred bidder over the right of light issue (see below) incurred extra costs. The Home Office required estimates from its advisers over each phase of work and presented monitoring reports on advisers' budgets and costs to the project board. The project was designated a Treasury Taskforce Significant Project by the Government in 1997 and was therefore supported by the Treasury Taskforce and its successor body, Partnerships UK throughout the period 1997-2002. The Home Office felt that the support from Partnerships UK, its legal advisers Berwin Leighton Paisner and financial advisers PricewaterhouseCoopers, was especially valuable in helping the transaction in its final stages to reach financial close.
6 |
| Costs incurred by the Home Office accommodation project on professional advisers between March 1996 and January 2003 | ||
|
| Advisers | Nature of Professional Advice | Total Cost (£m) to January 2003 |
|
| PricewaterhouseCoopers | Financial | 2.5 |
|
| Berwin Leighton Paisner | Legal | 2.6 |
|
| Knight Frank | Property | 0.6 |
|
| EC Harris | Property surveyors | 0.3 |
|
| The Thomas Saunders Partnership | Architectural services | 0.7 |
|
| Turner & Townsend5 | Monitoring Surveyor | 1.3 |
|
|
| Other | 1.1 |
|
| TOTAL |
| 9.1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Source: Home Office | ||
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5. The monitoring surveyors costs have been incurred during the course of 2002/03: they are responsible for monitoring AGP’s construction performance. Excluding their costs, the total advisers’ costs for the procurement process was £8m.