5.13 Good information is required by procuring authorities to enable the monitoring and management of their contracts. The information that a procuring authority is entitled to receive will be set out in their contract. Typically, PFI contracts provide that the project company should provide financial and management information, but this often relies on the procuring authority requesting the information in the first instance. There is limited regular periodic reporting, other than that required under the performance and payment mechanism.
5.14 Many procuring authorities do not make full use of their existing rights to request information, often because it is not clear what information exists or what they should ask for. Feedback, as part of the call for evidence, highlighted that some of the relevant provisions set out in the current standard contractual guidance were seen as unnecessarily complex or ambiguous. There is a risk, therefore, that procuring authorities do not have sufficient clarity of or confidence in the ongoing value for money of their contractual arrangements.
5.15 To address these issues, the new standard contractual guidance6, will improve the clarity of the information requirements and provisions required for each contract, whilst minimising any increase in information requirements on the private sector. Timely receipt of clear and relevant information will help aid procuring authorities in effective contract management, planning and optimisation of the use of their assets and services in order to deliver better and ongoing value for money. Box 5.A sets out some of the key information enhancements in the new standard contractual guidance.
5.16 As set out in Chapter 4, to further improve transparency an open book approach to the lifecycle fund will be adopted between the procuring authority and the contractor to increase the visibility of lifecycle costs in PF2. This will ensure that the provision of services and associated expenditure is transparent and the public sector understands exactly what it is paying for.
| Box 5.A: Enhanced information requirements The following reforms have been introduced in PF2 to enhance the information requirements: • to make the contract easier to understand the information requirements will be brought together into one place to enable the contract manager to understand what information they are entitled to and when and in what form it can be expected; • the private sector will provide a practical guide to using the contract, summarising key points of the contract, immediately following contract signature to aid the public sector's contract management; • phrases which have caused some ambiguity and potential dispute between contracting parties have been removed. For example, the authority being required to act "reasonably" in its requests, the contractor needing to provide information in an unspecified "summary" rather than provide the original data, with the result that the authority may not get all the necessary information it needs; • the clarity of what constitutes commercially confidential information has been improved through signposting of the Ministry of Justice's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidance on the issue; and • clarification will be provided that provision of information is part of the contractual service and that accordingly failure to provide it will constitute poor performance, resulting in financial deductions being made to the payment received by the contractor with the possibility of contract termination in the case of persistent breaches. |
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