Q51 Jon Trickett: That sentence I quote from a document that you have, by Oxford University Consulting, and in fact the whole document-which I understand you have commissioned, and in fact I understand you commission one for every Report that comes in front of the Committee of Public Accounts, which was not made available to Members and I had to request it and at first was refused permission to see it-makes it quite clear that this document here avoids the issue of value for money, does it not? Your consultants have told you that this Report does not address value for money issues properly, does it not?
Mr Burr: It does not attempt to say whether this transaction was or was not value for money.
Jon Trickett: Have you seen this document before, Chairman?
Chairman: I have not.
Jon Trickett: Were you aware that the NAO were commissioning regular reports?
Chairman: No.
Q52 Jon Trickett: Apparently you have a contract with two contractors which evaluate each Report which comes before the PAC.
Mr Burr: We have a very longstanding arrangement under which we get an external academic review of each Report we make.
Q53 Jon Trickett: I have seen some of these reports and some of them are very, very damning, yet you must have had those reports in hand at the time that the Chair was presented with your Report. Would that be true?
Mr Burr: There is obviously a range of assessments which are made of these Reports. Some are very good, in some of them there are obviously more criticisms.
Q54 Jon Trickett: This document gives you marks, does it not?
Mr Burr: Yes, they all do.
Q55 Jon Trickett: I do not know if the Chairman was as surprised as I was that these documents are in existence and they are not made available to Members, because at the end of the day we are in a kind of fishing expedition with these Reports. I would have thought that these Reports would be the best that could be presented to us and I now discover in fact that you have independent evaluations of every Report we have ever seen, some of which are very damning, are they not?
Mr Burr: I do not think they are generally damning. Some of them are very favourable.
Q56 Jon Trickett: Do you remember I was extremely critical on the LIFT Report, which is somewhat off the subject today, but I want to make the general point first? The report which you received on that was particularly frank.
Mr Burr: The Oxford University evaluation of that Report-I am not sure off the top of my head I can remember exactly what they had to say.
Jon Trickett: I will just leave it at that. This report is extremely illuminating. It makes an evaluation on seven separate areas of work, points out of three, as to how good or bad the Report is and in some cases the NAO gets one; in some cases it gets three. The overall conclusion is that the Report itself, "It does address some important consequences of the maturing PFI market but has limited effectiveness in evaluating value for money on managerial context." If the Report is not going to be improved before it comes to us at least we should know why we should be fishing. It is a substantial Report, as you can see, and it would point Members to some very interesting questions. I wonder if we might address this issue as Members perhaps at the end of the meeting or whenever you think is appropriate because I think this is something of a revelation.
Q57 Chairman: We can discuss it, yes.
Mr Burr: These reports would not normally be available until a little while after the Report had been prepared and often after the Committee has considered the Report.
Q58 Jon Trickett: I understand that this Report was clearly available before, since I got it.
Mr Burr: Yes, on this occasion, yes.
Q59 Jon Trickett: And the LIFT one, which was a particularly poor Report, I felt, you also had it in advance. Some of my questions are now going to be directed, but not all of them because I have taken up some time on this particular matter, to points which are made in here. First of all, I do not believe that a single figure in this whole Report is accurate in terms of the amount of cash going between the public sector and Octagon because they are all calculated, having taken into account something called a discount rate, are they not?
Mr Burr: Yes.
Q60 Jon Trickett: Is there any figure in here which actually represents the real amount of money that is going between the Trust and Octagon?
Mr Finlay: There is a figure in figure 24 on page 22 which sets out the annual price which the Trust is paying to Octagon under the contract.