3.1 The Department expects BSF to improve learning and teaching through using capital funding more strategically. It encourages Local Authorities to change the make-up and location of their school estate. It also encourages schools to spend more time planning the facilities and school environment to support their ethos and curriculum.
3.2 This encouragement has significantly increased the attention put into early planning. Under BSF, Local Authorities take as long planning as they do on the subsequent procurement (just under two years). By contrast, previous school PFI projects spent around a year getting approval for PFI funding from the Treasury's Project Review Group. Although there is no record of the time spent locally on strategic planning under other programmes, costs can act as a proxy. Only 5 per cent of advisory costs in 2004-06 school PFI projects were spent pre-procurement.8
3.3 Most participants believe that BSF's approach is leading to better-scoped projects. Seventy-eight per cent of Local Authority BSF managers and 86 per cent of BSF lead private contractors in our census said that BSF is leading to more strategic procurement of infrastructure compared to previous school building programmes (Figure 14).
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8 Unpublished data, collected for Improving the PFI tendering processs, National Audit Office, HC149 2006-07.