i The Department and Partnerships UK agree PfS's corporate targets annually, which influence the size of the bonus pool available to senior staff at PfS. So far these have focused on the timeliness of delivery, which, although important, needs to be balanced with maintaining the affordability of the programme and achieving effective outcomes.
The Department should establish a smaller balanced scorecard of performance indicators for PfS than it currently uses. These should better reflect the objectives of BSF, covering the timeliness, cost and quality of the programme's outcomes.
ii PfS's benchmarking data will be essential to help sustain value for money for schools not procured in competition.
PfS should speed up its collection of cost information on BSF schools including procurement, capital, facilities management, ICT, life cycle costs and PFI contract variation costs, and make this information available to Local Authorities so they can benchmark their costs.
The Department should invite Local Authorities to provide detailed cost information on major school projects procured outside the BSF programme so that PfS can include this cost information within its benchmarking.
iii The costs of setting up a LEP have been high for the first Local Authorities to do so. These costs should fall for future projects.
PfS should monitor the costs of establishing and using a LEP; disseminate good practice; streamline and standardise the process so as to help Local Authorities to cut these costs; and use frameworks where sensible to make procurement quicker.