Pensions Bill

Part of the debate – in a Public Bill Committee at 11:00 am on 15 January 2008.

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Tim Jones: We will be procuring business services through a formal, EU, public-sector procurement process—the publication of what are called OJEU notices in the Official Journalof the European Union and then the procedure that follows on from that. It is a little early to be absolutely clear about which of the individual processes available under that umbrella of processes we will be following. We will, as PADA, have a mixture of our own staff and consultant support within PADA—my procurement team, within the executive team—managing that process. The business services that we procure will be from a contracting party. That contracting party or parties, at the end of this process, will have a contract that, I am sure, will be rich and have service level agreements and all the rest of it. That is how we will manage the outcomes and at the quality levels that we wish.

The real issue is the way in which we work the process in a high-quality manner, the way in which we develop our conversations and the quality of the documents that we put out. I can assure you that, having delivered a number of reasonably complex systems of scale in my principally banking past, I take very seriously indeed the process of creating specifications that lead to good outcomes.