Take, for example, the tendency of politicians and public officials to set unrealistic timescales for large procurements. This was raised by Sir Michael Latham in his 1994 report on government construction contracting, who warned: 'A hasty project is unlikely to proceed smoothly. Everyone will lose, and the client most of all'. And by Sir Peter Levene in his 1995 'efficiency scrutiny' of construction procurement.44
It was identified as a significant cause of the early problems at Yarl's Wood Removal Centre, particularly the riots and the fire that damaged that facility in 2002, shortly after it opened. A comprehensive and extremely frank review found that the origins of this disaster lay in a politically-driven timescale. These targets were widely regarded as unachievable, but staff did not believe that they had permission to challenge them. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman concluded: 'In future, all targets must be rigorously tested in terms of achievability before they gain currency'.45
It seems that no one was listening. The NAO has repeatedly pointed to this as a major source of contract failure in a series of reports from 2002 (at least) to the present.46 An unrealistic timescale (combined with an obsession about delivering those timescales) is considered to be one of the principal reasons why the NHS National Programme for IT, commissioned in 2002 but still being implemented in the present day, has run into so many difficulties.47
The problem is not confined to the UK. The Australian National Audit Office recently reported on the contract with a large private company to manage the government's offshore immigration detention centres, where politically-driven timeframes meant that the Commonwealth Procurement Rules could not be followed. There was no time for value-for-money assessments when selecting the providers. 'Services and price were not agreed between the parties until contract negotiations ended', and in one case, this did not occur until almost five months after operations commenced.48
It is not that government has been unaware of this particular form of optimism bias, but that it seems to have had no way of learning the lessons. The National Audit Office has produced excellent reports over many years which have studied the lessons, good and bad, from commissioning, procurement and contract management, and there have been periodic reports by government inquiries and think tanks which have recommended fundamental changes to the way in which government undertakes these activities. Few of these have had a significant or lasting impact.