2.2 Under the proposed PPP, the Agency wanted its contractor to take over responsibility for the operational performance of the existing telecommunications infrastructure. To achieve this transfer of responsibility, the Agency wanted the bidders to have access to a comprehensive set of reliable information about the condition of the assets and their performance. Such a set of information was intended to allow bidders to price the services without building in large contingences for uncertainty.
2.3 A major exercise was therefore undertaken by the Agency to assemble information about the condition and performance of its existing telecommunications networks. The Agency spent over £400,000 in advisers' fees as the procurement team collected and maintained over 15,000 documents about the existing telecommunications systems; information that the Agency made available to bidders.
2.4 The eventual winning bidder, GeneSYS, confirmed that the information that the Agency had collected was plentiful. GeneSYS, however, had concerns about the reliability of the data, particularly since the Agency, as part of its risk transfer goal, refused to warrant the accuracy of the provided material. While the company was prepared to bear performance risk associated with the existing assets, it did so on the basis of its own due diligence work.