3. A breakdown of hours to be undertaken by cost centre should be provided identifying grades of staff where appropriate. An assessment of the reasonableness of the quoted number of hours will be undertaken by one of the following methods:
• CAAS are normally only employed for high value requirements (over £1m), but can be asked to advise on lower value requirements in certain circumstances. For instance, if this will provide information on which further changes can be assessed. CAAS could therefore be asked to advise on the first or subsequent changes to be implemented on a PPP/PFI arrangement to provide a confidence level for future changes. CAAS can also be tasked to provide a "should cost" estimate. This is a less accurate estimate of what a particular job should cost and is generally more applicable to lower value tasks.
• Assessment against previous work undertaken on similar requirements. The FsAST acquisition team has a lot of expertise of changes to synthetic training equipment and has developed a matrix of changes across all PPP/PFI contracts. This provides visibility of changes placed and identifies the point of contact within the acquisition teams should other members of the acquisition team be addressing similar/same requirements. If individual acquisition team members do not have the experience or expertise to enable them to estimate if the number of hours quoted are reasonable for the work proposed they should consult their colleagues in the acquisition team (or other acquisition teams if appropriate) for advice. Note - as mentioned in paragraph 62 of the Authoritative Guidance above, information should be retained and shared, where possible, between different acquisition teams and across Government. Acquisition team members who are considering implementing Changes should take advantage of other sources of experience and expertise, as suggested by paragraph 29, of the Authoritative Guidance above.