Dear XXXXXX
You should read this before the remainder of my reply – essentially your Contract Manager has a financial interest in harassing you over “civil bill rejects”.
The prospect of a sanction following a KPI failure was specifically and expressly removed from the 2013 Contract i.e. they decided Contract Notices and sanctions were not appropriate and intended to deal with KPI failure via negotiation.
Consequently all Contract Notices issued in this regard are against a different section of Contract usually Standard Term 14.3. This requires claims to be “true, accurate and reasonable”. I can seen no way in which an error in bill preparation can represent a material breach of this term therefore any such Contract Notice is wrongly issued.
You cannot appeal a CN until a sanction is proposed. We have yet to experience a sanction in this regard but feel sure that this would have equally wrongly been issued for an alleged material breach of 14.3.
The issuing of sanctions for “persistent breach” i.e. 3 breaches of a single term in 24 months is, in our experience, a rarity. Furthermore, as above, we think that their approach is fundamentally flawed and be doomed to be overturned on appeal.
In general I advise firms to lose no sleep whatsoever with regard to the confetti of Contract Notices currently raining down on firms. Indeed we offer a free service (akin to TV presenters and threatening chain letters) where we indeed do tear them into small pieces and throw them happily into the breeze.
The clear conflict of interest between the LAA “holiday bonus” scheme and the Civil Service Code has likewise not yet been tested.