NHS trusts to ditch ProCure21?

NHS Trusts are questioning the use of ProCure21 contractors to deliver their schemes as the recession bites, turning instead to traditional lowest price tendering, the Department of Health revealed this week.

The Department of Health is so concerned that it has put out a guidance note warning NHS Trusts against going for lowest price tendering and urging them to continue to use the ProCure21 framework.
 
Any significant shift to traditional tendering by Trusts could undermine the future of the ProCure21 framework and its successor, the £4bn ProCure21 Plus framework, currently being tendered.

The note reveals that "some NHS Clients and their advisors have been questioning the use of frameworks such as ProCure21 for fear that they are not able to take advantage of the lower perceived tender prices that seem to be available" as a result of the recession.

DH recognises the "extremely challenging" market conditions but warns clients of the "greater risk" of going outside ProCure 21, which has so far delivered 97% of schemes on time and to budget with on litigation.

Clients are warned that "competitively tendered margins of 2-3% are unrealistic and unsustainable and may create bad practices on projects" such as defective work, subcontractor failure, spiralling costs and adversarial behaviour.