3.26 The Government is aware that one of the major drivers of increasing private sector bid costs is the design process. Experience from the Building Schools for the Future programme particularly demonstrated that bidders were encouraged to carry out excessive design work in competition in order to win a bid. This contributed to unnecessarily high bid costs due to the volume of wasted design work.
3.27 Going forward procuring authorities will be required to give due consideration to their design requirements to ensure they are appropriate. Steps are already being taken on the Priority School's Building Programme to reduce the amount of design carried out in competition. In respect of a batch of schools put out to procurement, bidders will be asked to produce a design for a secondary and a primary school in competition and explain how these designs could be replicated across all the schools in the batch. Excessive design development by bidders will be actively discouraged as the EFA will not take into account additional specifications and designs which have not been formally requested. This approach will lead bidders to concentrate their efforts on producing functional designs which are replicable across the batch and which respond to a clear set of predetermined requirements.