Curiosity kills the CAT

We all want some certainty in our lives, especially when we are spending large sums of money for goods and services. The more money we plan to spend, the more research we carry out on the product and its supplier.
It's no different for local authorities, when they are spending large amounts of taxpayers' money to procure construction services. If there was a ready-made assessment of all the contractors in the market and their relative performances on recent projects, they would surely use it.
Well there is such a measure - in the shape of the Highways Agency's (HA) Capability Assessment Toolkit (CAT) league table - but there is also a problem. Councils that ask contractors for their CAT scores to use in their selection process will be doing so out of the context in which those scores were set.







It's understandably worrying contractors (particularly those with low CAT scores), and it is also concerning the HA, which has warned local authorities not to use CAT as an indicator of a contractor's competence.
It must be a hugely tempting shortcut for local authorities, which, if there turn out to be problems on their contracts, can argue that "the contractors were good enough for the HA, so they should have been good enough for us". But it is a desperately flawed piece of reasoning.
First, using CAT scores does not give local authorities any more protection against contracts that go wrong.
Second, it puts small firms, which are largely dependent on local authority contracts, at a major disadvantage to their larger competitors.
And third, it means that local authorities fail to build up their own database of contractor performance - which would be a far better and more reliable measure.