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Defence Estates outlines £500m-a-year spending programme

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  1. MOD maintenance work worth £500M a year although welcome, will be a poor substitute for a healthy construction industry not only because of this relatively tiny sum but also because of the MOD tendering process. This has generally been mismanaged in the past as the consultants advising the MOD come up with ever more weird and wonderful tendering procedures resulting in huge waste in time, paper and money spent by the tendering consortia.

    The last such tender process for the selection of Prime Contractors for the five regions, which also included for significant new build, took the best part of 2 years. The response (by all bidders) to the numerous and largely meaningless questions about intentions, environmental and sustainability issues would have easily cost more than a million A4 sheets of paper, and countless hours at the computer. Each bidder could have spent close to £1m all told on the tender effort.

    Beefing up the tender documents and tying up tenderers with all sorts of promises and statements of good intentions has not produced better contract and site managements. So please MOD, stop making the process more complicated and wasteful than it needs be.

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