3.4 During the procurement, the Agency applied demanding quality standards to the production of its bid documents. This work was the major reason for delays and increases in the advisers' costs. Leading members of the KHHD consortium told us that, in their experience of PPP projects, they had not encountered such high standards within the public sector. The Agency's reasons for requiring high quality documents were:
■ To reduce the risk of price increases during preferred bidder negotiations;
■ To secure greater clarity in the output specification for the upgrading of the network; and
■ To enhance certainty of the prices for additional works during the operational phase.
3.5 The frequent revisions of both the procurement's budget and timetable, as cost and time targets were exceeded (Appendix 5), suggest, however, that the Agency and KHHD struggled to quantify the amount of work needed to complete the procurement. KHHD's project manager told us that, during the preparation of the bid documents, the procurement team's forecasts for completion date and procurement cost contained too much optimism about the amount of work needed and so were not as good as they should have been.