12. The Government's position in some public sector markets is monopsonistic. It has huge power as the only buyer in those markets to set prices, standards of quality and to determine the behaviour of participants. The Government should recognise in its response to our report its position as a monopolistic buyer in some markets and commit to publishing a strategy which would identify what it thinks the risks that arise from this are, how it can mitigate them and what it can do to improve these markets and render them more stable. (Paragraph 53)
13. UK governments have often transferred risks to contractors that they cannot possibly manage. This is driven, in part, by the decision to use contractual models such as payment by results which involve risk transfer on a huge scale. The transfer of large amounts of risk is often counter-productive: leading to more conservative approaches to service delivery. This situation has been made worse by the fact that governments have often not understood fully the services or projects they have wanted the private sector to manage and without any understanding or data about the assets being handed over. (Paragraph 63)
14. The Government's guidance on risk transfer is sensible but too often that guidance appears to have been ignored in Departments. The Government must ensure that in the future this guidance is followed. In areas where the Government lacks information about the state of existing provision of services, it must evaluate which risks its partners are capable of taking on and which risks must remain with the Government. The Government ultimately cannot outsource the need to understand what it is outsourcing. We expect the Government to set out to us new procedures to ensure guidance about risk transfer is followed in the future. For example, contract announcements could be accompanied by a disclosure of which risks each party has agreed to manage. (Paragraph 64)
15. The complexity of risk management is exacerbated in some of the innovative contractual models that the Government has used recently. The Government should pause its roll-out of these models, such as payment by results, given the difficulties the Government has had in evaluating which activity leads to outcomes and working out costs. In areas where payment by results has been implemented, we believe that the Government should, if it decides to re-purchase the services, re-evaluate how it apportions risk between itself and providers. The Government should in its response to this report lay out how it would do this. (Paragraph 65)
16. The Government's preoccupation with price has been noticed by the market and is a matter of grave concern. The Government's failure to assess the quality of services as well as their cost is lamentable. There needs to be a complete reappraisal of how the Government assesses quality of the work it commissions. This will both incentivise providers of services to focus more on quality and ensure there is less chance of providers aggressively undercutting bids deliberately with the intention of potentially renegotiating the contract later on. This is particularly important in cases of complex services for vulnerable people, where the risks and the consequences of service failure are most acute. It is no surprise that the quality and reliability of privately supplied services is so variable if the Government nearly always judges bids on price alone. (Paragraph 71)
17. The Government's decision to revise the terms of some contracts underlines the failure of contracting within government. We agree with the Justice Select Committee that these renegotiations point to underlying issues with the capacity of the Government to successfully let contracts. Renegotiation often reflects poor risk allocation and poor information about the original service that was contracted out. The Government is also potentially exposed to legal risk through doing this. We have not received evidence about the costs of bringing in these changes but presume they are substantial. While it may be unavoidable that the Government has to re-negotiate some contracts to ensure services continue to function, the fact that it has had to renegotiate over £120 million of contracts in the last two and a half years is an indictment of its initial negotiating approach. (Paragraph 75)
18. In each case where the Government has had to renegotiate a contract because its initial assumptions about cost, risk transfer or contractual structure have proved incorrect, we believe the Government should undertake a lessons learned exercise to identify what went wrong. The lessons identified in this exercise should be shared with the Comptroller and Auditor General and his officials to decide whether there are any issues to report to Parliament. (Paragraph 76)