Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:31 pm on 20 November 2018.
The reason why we've chosen strategic partnering to deliver MIM education projects is that it allows for the capital value of individual projects to be much lower than they would be under single procurement. So, we encourage, of course, bundling to happen in order for the cost to go down, amongst other reasons. The successful strategic partner is granted the opportunity to deliver the aggregated pipeline of MIM education schemes—that's up to £500 million in value—and that represents an efficient and agile way to deliver single or small batched schemes at a local level with values as low as £15 million, because, without that, every individual local authority or further education institution would need to run a full procurement for each of its individual MIM projects, which is impractical and time consuming. We would encourage local authorities, of course, to take a bundling approach so that their own costs are brought down and, secondly, of course, to make sure that they are able to deliver projects that otherwise probably wouldn't be delivered because they are smaller in scale.