Whilst we work on the latest procurement round, Police Station Telephone Advice Services, the fallout from the last, 2015 Duty Contracts rumbles on – if that’s what fallout does.
The 2 offer an important contrast.
The grant of a small number of national contracts in a 2-stage procurement exercise has a lot to recommend it. Whilst it involves, at PQQ stage, the scoring of written answers, these require responses to 3 very tightly posed questions entirely focused upon historic service delivery. One might argue that it favours incumbent suppliers but in general it looks pretty fair.
The distribution of hundreds of generally much smaller contracts, across 85 procurement areas, ignoring a long established pattern of supply is not remotely similar. Furthermore it is difficult to conceive of a more convoluted assessment procedure to achieve it.
A million pound plus PSTAS contract requires 3, 2000 character-with-spaces answers, a £70 – £600K Duty Contract requires double that for the “tie-breakers” alone. 6 compared to 84K characters in total, fourteen times more work. The unmanageable nature of marking all these answers was equally predictable – hence the mistakes we are spotting in each and every failed bid.
Some years ago we got involved in the “appeal litigation” surrounding a PSTAS type process. It was relatively straightforward and a loser displaced a winner as a result. Contracts were let, on time, and functioned thereafter (as far as I know)
By contrast the, entirely foreseeable, current equivalent shows all the signs of being very far from simple.
When you consider all the other factors – savings are delivered by administrative fee cuts, the outcome has not demonstrated any basis for “market consolidation” and there are still major concerns about its medium term sustainability – you have a real train crash
An inappropriate model, made unnecessarily complicated, on a scale which was demonstrably, administratively unmanageable and which has delivered perverse results. Who’d have thought it?
Here are some thoughts we prepared earlier.