2 We reviewed key documentation including site search reports; several versions of the Bicester business case; the accommodation centre benefits realisation papers; the detailed briefing document; the criteria and process used to select the preferred bidder; tender evaluation criteria and scoring; and Gateway Review reports.23 We also reviewed some of the cost reports and summaries and validated a sample of contractors' and consultants' invoices to check that they had been correctly recorded in the project cost summaries and in the Home Office's financial statements. We also made use of the Home Office's dedicated website for the Bicester centre and the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK (ICAR) website, including the statements submitted to the independent public inquiry, which closed in March 2003. We used these sources to:
■ establish the sequence of events in the Bicester project;
■ identify the factors taken into account by the accommodation centre project team; and
■ establish the extent to which they were constrained by external factors.
3 We used the latest versions of the business case (May 2004) and the benefits realisation paper (April 2005) to assess the reasonableness of the costs and benefits claimed for the project. We considered the reasonableness of the capitalisation of costs and the write-off of capitalised costs after the decision was taken not to proceed with the pilot. Data on asylum application numbers came from our earlier work on asylum statistics Asylum and migration: a review of Home Office statistics (HC 625, Session 2003-04) and from published Asylum Statistics.
4 By the time we began our review, many of the key papers and cost schedules had been archived. Not all of the papers requested from the Home Office could be located, for example, the minutes of the meeting(s) between the Home Office and HM Treasury relating to the Comprehensive Spending Review in July 2003, at which the reduced funding available for the first two pilot accommodation centres was agreed.
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23 Gateway Reviews are carried out on major IT-enabled construction and procurement programmes and projects. These can be reviewed at six stages of the procurement lifecycle. In the case of the Bicester project, Gateway Reviews took place at Gateways 2 and 2A (Procurement Strategy) and Gateway 3 (Investment Decision).