2 We undertook a survey of 107 PFI contracts covering projects across central government and local bodies including the NHS. We achieved a 70% response rate. The survey results can be found in our online publication 'PFI contract expiry - survey results'.57
3 We identified 107 PFI contracts that have or will expire in the seven years from 2020-21. Of these, 89 were still operational at the time the survey was conducted, and 18 had already expired.
4 We used the following sources to determine our survey population:
• HM Treasury's PFI database was the main information source;
• contract expiry dates are not included in the PFI database, so we used the year of the final unitary charge payment as a proxy;
• we produced a list of expired projects by comparing historic PFI databases; and
• we included in our sample contracts expiring in the seven years from 2020-21 as this achieved a balance between having a sufficiently large pool of potential respondents (about 20% English PFI contracts as of March 2018) with enough representation of accommodation-type projects, such as schools and hospitals, which represent the majority of the contracts in both the sample and the overall population. This approach also minimised the number of instances where authorities may not have started preparations yet.
5 A number of exclusions were made to the sample population:
• PFI contracts entered into by the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were excluded. This is because these projects are outside the remit of HM Treasury and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), hence any findings and recommendations in this report are not directly applicable to the devolved governments;
• projects that were terminated early were excluded; and
• a number of 'non-typical' PFI projects were excluded from the sample population. These exclusions largely relate to older, expired PFI contracts such as small Information and Communications Technology projects, which do not represent future projects in the expiry pipeline.
6 Since our survey population was based on estimated contract expiry dates, a small number of contracts were included despite having expiry dates outside of our seven year sample period.
7 The survey questions were developed using HM Treasury's Standardisation of PFI Contracts (SoPC) guidance (version 4) together with the National Audit Office's (NAO's) existing knowledge based on previous reports. The questions were tested with the IPA and Local Partnerships. The survey consisted of the following nine themes: asset use, the PFI contract and handover provisions, retention funds, disputes, preparation for expiry, staffing, governance, information requests, and monitoring.
8 Each survey response was reviewed, and in some cases, additional contact was made to either clarify responses to ensure the results were being correctly interpreted or to request additional information. Where possible we have attempted to corroborate evidence from the survey respondents through interviews. We have not attempted to audit the individual PFI contracts included in the survey.
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57 Available at: www.nao.org.uk/other/nao-interactive-data-visualisation-on-pfi-contracts/