Q131 Chair: Which adviser?
Ginny Clarke: No, no, no-they're members of the Department for Transport.
Q132 Chair: Well, I can't think that anybody else in the middle of a credit crunch would have thought that construction costs would go up if you dumped one of the projects. The whole construction industry was absolutely desperate for work.
Ginny Clarke: Just in time terms, this was March 2008. So it wasn't at the height of the credit crunch. Just as a point of information, this table was submitted through the project to the Department and Ministers in March 2008. I was just making the point that that is when those figures were produced. The figures were then adjusted as we got further in and subsequently led to another set of figures, which the NAO looked at, at the time when we were going to award and when we were clearly in the height of the financial crisis.
Q133 Mrs McGuire: What evidence did they have to make that calculation? Was it just a hunch, was it just plucked out of the air that one of the largest procurers of this kind of work would suddenly find themselves at the end of a financial cosh if they changed tack?
Ginny Clarke: I didn't do the actual bit of work, but I understand, because I was there at the time and I was involved with this, that they looked at other PFI contracts across Government-you're right that this wasn't just within the Department, but across Government-and at the view of the risks of pursuing all those other PFIs. That was what that was trying to do in terms of the impact for us.
Q134 Chair: I accept that that was March 2008. By September 2008, if I've got my chronology correct, the table would have changed. Why did you not then review whether you should do a PFI?
Ginny Clarke: We did review when we got to the next stage, which was a little later than that. That was when we had gone through the assessment and we were getting to the stage of contract awards.
Q135 Chair: Why did you do it?
Ginny Clarke: Effectively, that's when we reassessed all these numbers. In fact, higher costs were put in at that stage-
Q136 Chair: Was it still value for money then? If we looked at figure 10, with all the provisos that we have around it, redone in, I don't know-
Ginny Clarke: 2009, it was. The contract-
Q137 Chair: When?
Ginny Clarke: The decision about whether to award the contract, which was May-
Chair: A year later.
Ginny Clarke: That was when it was reassessed.
Q138 Chair: Was it still value for money?
Ginny Clarke: It was still value for money.
Graham Dalton: These figures are comparing two different things. Figure 10 is talking about what if we went for-this was as yet unproven-hard shoulder running instead of widening.
Chair: It wasn't unproven, but we'll come back to that.
Q139 Mr Bacon: You've got a huge number in there that distorts the amount of saving that you make. You've got a figure that's far higher than it should be and that intrudes on your £330 million saving and makes it much smaller than it would otherwise be. In fact, the number that's doing the intruding on the £330 million should be much smaller-that was my point. I take Ginny Clarke's point about what the number at the bottom for the net additional cost covers, but, regardless, it would have been much, much, much smaller and might not even have been a net additional cost at all; it might have been a net, net, net additional saving-that was my point.
Graham Dalton: I accept your point. If you just take the top half of the table, the £87 million may have come down to a lower figure.
Q140 Mr Bacon: No, no. It would have been a much higher figure. You wouldn't have been lopping £193 million off your £330 million. At the bottom, you'd have had a net, net, net additional saving.
Graham Dalton: The minus £53 million may have got closer to zero.