Detail
This note is intended to help companies provide high quality and well evidenced proposals for direct procurement for customers (DPCs) in their business plans. As part of PR19, we introduced ‘Direct procurement for customers’ (DPC), a process for water companies to competitively tender for a third party (a competitively appointed provider, or CAP) to design, build, finance, operate and maintain infrastructure. This initiative has the potential to provide significant benefits for customers through promoting innovation and enabling capital and operational cost savings as well as a reduction in financing costs. This information notice reminds companies of our expectations for their business plans in September 2018 and emphasises the importance of developing a high quality and well-evidenced value for money (VfM) assessment. For the avoidance of doubt, this note does not set out any new requirements for business plans, but builds on what we set out in the PR19 methodology in some areas to provide further clarity.