Thursday 16 May 2013

Missing the point on HS2

If you turned on any of the TV or radio news programmes, picked up a newspaper or scanned Twitter this morning, it is almost impossible that you missed the NAO's anticipated shortfall on the proposed HS2 train link. It is not surprising that the business case doesn't stack up - even I have been questioning some of the more basic assumptions which were in the public domain. However, for the public procurement community there are more significant issues:

  1. Why, after the rail franchise fiasco and the subsequent route and branch review of evaluation methodologies, were there errors in the calculations which had not been identified through internal QA?
  2. In the current environment of government 'transparency' in 'all things procurement' why was the business justification not more clearly set out?
  3. Why did a gateway review not pick-up and lead to the resolution of the issues identified by the NAO?

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