Communications

From the three councils that make up the Procuring Authority, Reading Borough Council acts as the administrating authority. Thus, this council takes up the role of leading communications with the Project Company and stakeholders. The current strategy for public outreach is through social media, which has proven to reach more people at a lower cost than the previous arrangement of scheduling public meetings.

The Procuring Authority and the Project Company are co-located in a single location for the operational management of the PPP contract. This has helped greatly in building a strong relationship between the parties. The day to day interactions acted both as a deterrent to hostile behaviour and facilitator in building strong relationships. The nature of the relationship has matured to the extent that both parties continued to operate amicably even after a period in which they took wholly different positions on the sharing of revenue.