Public and major projects - contract management

Effective contract management is an important way of ensuring these assets and related services deliver value for money for contracting authorities, as well as anticipated returns for sponsors and funders.

It also means improvement in service provision, including maintenance and lifecycle of the asset, and preparing the public sector, the sponsors, sub-contractors and funders for exit from a PFI/PPP contract in due course.

We advise government departments and the wider public sector, including local authorities and NHS Trusts, project companies, building and Facilities Management (FM) contractors and funders on legacy PFI/PPP contracts.

We are familiar with a broad range of different standard form contracts including social housing, health, LIFT, Building Safety Fund (BSF) and street lighting. We understand and will clearly explain key issues and concepts and provide you with robust commercial solutions.

We regularly advise clients on a range of contract management issues including assessing:

• compliance with key requirements of PFI/PPP, including fire safety legislation and compliance with lifecycle requirements under the PFI/PPP contract;
• performance management issues, including calculation of service failures and adjustments to the unitary charge payments and the application of other remedies such as persistent breach;
• potential savings which may be available under the existing terms of the PFI/PPP contract.

We also advise clients on refinancing their PFI/PPP contracts and complex variations to existing PFI/PPP contracts, including associated procurement risks.

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• Advising a central government department on the variation to an existing PFI/PPP contract. The department contacted TLT to advise of the route to varying the contract and to prepare the form of variation which involved the removal of the obligation to provide utilities to the relevant project. We worked with the client’s commercial and financial teams to prepare the form of variation.
• Advising a number of local authorities across England (across sectors) on changes to their PFI/PPP projects. We have advised local authorities in relation to contract management issues (e.g. proper completion of construction programmes and ongoing performance issues), refinancing PFI/PPP projects and major variations of existing projects (e.g. LED luminaire installations on street lighting PFI projects).
• Advising the funder on a variation to a health PFI project following the NHS Trust’s decision to in-source the FM provision. We worked closely with the advisors to the project company to ensure that the funder’s position was properly protected as a result of the variation.