NAO presentation to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) Public Services Industry Review

A NAO team led by Ed Humpherson recently gave a presentation to a review of the Public Services Industry by BERR. The BERR review was chaired by DeAnne Julius, a former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member.

This was an opportunity to draw on NAO experience across the Office on public service delivery. Speaking alongside Ed Humpherson in the NAO team were David Finlay (Director of PFI Development) and Tim Banfield (Defence Director). The presentation focused on both macro issues (how the public sector develops programmes of public service projects and builds private sector markets to deliver the projects) and micro issues (the issues which individual projects need to address to achieve value for money).

Lessons from the NAO’s private finance work which contributed to the presentation included the need to actively manage value throughout the contract period. Issues such as dealing with contract variations and benchmarking or market testing of the ongoing service provision need to be carefully managed to ensure that any resulting price changes can be demonstrated to be value for money.

For more information, see the Public Services Industry Review pages on the BERR website.