Recommendation 14

We asked the Ministry why it kept making the same mistakes when it came to contracting out services and how it would avoid these in future. The Ministry told us that it would no longer let contracts using the approach that it took in 2015. It explained that the main lesson it had learned from first-generation outsourcing was that it needed to know what it was outsourcing in much more detail. It told us that in both transforming rehabilitation and facilities management, it had been a mistake to try to outsource a problem, and that it would have been better to first work out what the problem was, fix it and then outsource the service. It assured us that with the next generation of contracts it was taking its time, including undertaking a comprehensive asset survey, and that it was pricing the contracts correctly to incentivise quality rather than cost.28