Q101 Mr Bacon: You did not want it either?
Mr Briggs: No.
Q102 Mr Bacon: Sir Brian did not want it. Nobody seems to have wanted it, do they?
Mr Briggs: No.
Q103 Mr Bacon: And those who did want it did not know about it. Great! In paragraph 3.21, on page 31, Sir Brian, I think this has been alluded to earlier, you ended up in a position where you actually could not terminate the contract. You were in a position where you had concerns but your legal counsel said you might not have grounds for termination any more because you had had discussions and following the spirit of those discussions the Department could be exposed to risks. How was it that you got yourselves into a position where you had not got what you wanted and yet you were not able to terminate the contract?
Sir Brian Bender: Again, I might ask Mr Dawes to say a bit more. I am not sure I can add to what I said in earlier replies to these questions in terms of what advice we were getting and why that was the case. Can you add something?
Mr Dawes: I think the issue here was that we had been discussing a Supplemental Deed to resolve a number of issues and there was doubt, certainly in the legal advice, as to whether in the process of having those discussions we had, by implication, agreed to some extension of time and there was that risk there. The Supplemental Deed was never signed, as I think the Report shows, but there still was that underlying risk that if there was a problem in terms of us pursuing a termination at that point, this might have been something we had stumbled into inadvertently. It was never consciously discussed, but the fact we were actually talking to them about various issues in the contract could imply that we were dealing with an extension of time.
Q104 Mr Bacon: What steps did the Department take, if any, informally to see whether it could find contractors to replace Laser?
Mr Dawes: We did not, I think is the short answer. The prospect of actually going to the market with a job like this, halfway through, with all sorts of difficulties, was certainly one of the issues that we felt was quite persuasive.
Q105 Mr Bacon: In not doing it?
Mr Dawes: In not doing it.
Q106 Mr Bacon: You mean apart from cultivating the market, as Sir Brian wanted you to do, you would have poisoned it?
Mr. Dawes: I think at this stage of the job it was fairly clear that there were all sorts of issues which were quite difficult. We had a major concern to go to the market at that time would have given us a real problem.
Sir Brian Bender: Arguably, what the companies did not appreciate at the time of the contract was the extent of the design risk they were taking on. The judgment the Department was reaching by the time of the period you are now covering in the questioning was that the market would have realised that by then, and therefore any recontracting of any sort would have been likely to have been at a much higher price. That is the advice the Department was getting.
Q107 Mr Bacon: This is my final question: was there not a warning sign quite early on when you ended up with just two bidders that actually this was not a particularly attractive proposition?
Sir Brian Bender: Again, I am not sure I can say more than the response to the earlier questions on that. We had reason to believe, based on the expertise of the companies and what we understood about what we were asking and what had been done elsewhere, that this was going to be doable. That obviously turned out not to be the case but at the time, as I say, based on what the companies had delivered and what we thought we were asking for and what was actually existing in the current facilities, it did not seem such a problem.
Q108 Mr Bacon: Finally, sorry Chairman because I did say that was my last one; can you remind me, Sir Brian, when joined the DTI and left Defra you had been at Defra for how long?
Sir Brian Bender: I joined the Ministry of Agriculture in June 2000 and Defra was created in June 2001 and I joined the DTI on 3 October 2005.
Q109 Mr Bacon: You do not want to come back on 31 October, do you?
Sir Brian Bender: I did give evidence to the Efra Select Committee so what I said about my stewardship, albeit to a different Committee on slightly different questions, is on the Parliamentary record.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr Bacon. Alan Williams?
Q110Mr Williams: I was puzzled as well about these two bidders and by Sir Brian's comment-not surprised by his comment, I accepted the sense of it-that he might have said to the new Minister it would have been nicer to have more than two bids. Why did that not set any alarm bells ringing? Surely it should have done?
Mr Dawes: It certainly was not desirable, should I say, to have such a limited field but, as I think we have mentioned before, we felt that the Laser bid, the component parts of it, the fact that Laing were going to construct this with all the experience that they had with GSK and a number of other facilities, and with Serco supporting it as well, bearing in mind that Serco at the time had the science contract to operate the laboratory, that to us appeared to be quite a powerful combination. The track record and also the experience that they had had suggested to us that they had all the skills that were required to deliver this project. However, I accept the point that it would have been certainly more attractive, should I say, to have had more bids. On the choice of either stopping the whole process and ret endering or going ahead with Laser, we concluded the right decision was to go ahead with Laser.