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Amey rethinks PFI bids after Plymouth debacle
10:03 16 Nov 2005
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Amey will scrutinise its future health PFI bids with greater care after getting its fingers burnt when the £330m Plymouth Vanguard Hospital PFI deal collapsed earlier this year.
Chief executive Mel Ewell said Amey, which was left as the only bidder on that project after the Multiplex and Bonaventure consortia pulled out, is introducing more “robust” evaluations of future health opportunities.
“We have learnt a lot from the Plymouth experience,” Ewell said. “We are now making sure that a project is robust enough to be carried right through to the end, which is no bad thing. This will mean greater due diligence and a more selective approach.”
He added: “The situation at Plymouth concerned us. It should never have resulted in going to
a single bidder status. It was a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. If it
got to this, there must have been something that was fundamentally wrong from the outset.
“We committed a lot of capital and human resources to the project; skills are not easy to come by and it was annoying that the project failed through no fault of our own.
“The most important fact is that human resources need to work on such a huge project. Capital is not constrained in the market, but skills resources are.”
Ewell also alluded to the fact that Amey’s attention might be turned more to the education sector rather than health due to the consistency of workloads.
“With education, there is a pipeline of works and some visibility, especially with the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme,” he revealed. “There is no clarity now in health. The number of acute hospitals coming down the pipeline is much less than previously. The number of different strategies in health hasn’t helped either.
“There has been a fleet of initiatives from acutes to diagnostic treatment centres, LIFTs and independent sector diagnostic treatment centres. Each one has a material affect and you have to get the right teams together to cater for them.”
Ewell also predicted that the 20 contractors bidding for the first wave of BSF projects would almost certainly reduce in number within the next 12 months.
“Everyone is interested in BSF at the moment. However, when people start to get a feel of what it’s all about the numbers will fall and naturally balance out.”
Chief executive Mel Ewell said Amey, which was left as the only bidder on that project after the Multiplex and Bonaventure consortia pulled out, is introducing more “robust” evaluations of future health opportunities.
“We have learnt a lot from the Plymouth experience,” Ewell said. “We are now making sure that a project is robust enough to be carried right through to the end, which is no bad thing. This will mean greater due diligence and a more selective approach.”
He added: “The situation at Plymouth concerned us. It should never have resulted in going to
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a single bidder status. It was a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. If it
got to this, there must have been something that was fundamentally wrong from the outset.
“We committed a lot of capital and human resources to the project; skills are not easy to come by and it was annoying that the project failed through no fault of our own.
“The most important fact is that human resources need to work on such a huge project. Capital is not constrained in the market, but skills resources are.”
Ewell also alluded to the fact that Amey’s attention might be turned more to the education sector rather than health due to the consistency of workloads.
“With education, there is a pipeline of works and some visibility, especially with the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme,” he revealed. “There is no clarity now in health. The number of acute hospitals coming down the pipeline is much less than previously. The number of different strategies in health hasn’t helped either.
“There has been a fleet of initiatives from acutes to diagnostic treatment centres, LIFTs and independent sector diagnostic treatment centres. Each one has a material affect and you have to get the right teams together to cater for them.”
Ewell also predicted that the 20 contractors bidding for the first wave of BSF projects would almost certainly reduce in number within the next 12 months.
“Everyone is interested in BSF at the moment. However, when people start to get a feel of what it’s all about the numbers will fall and naturally balance out.”
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