PUBLIC CONTRACT PROJECT : CASE MOD-THALE
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CALL TO ACTION
To public bodies and innovative private enterprises: the recurring flaws in major public procurement, as evidenced by our investigation into the Thales contract and other systemic failures, create unacceptable risks and inefficiencies for both government and industry. To solve this, Competition & Consumer Organisation Party Limited is pioneering a new approach. We are forming a pre-vetted consortium of expert suppliers, consultants, and legal professionals designed to offer robust, transparent, and high-value solutions to the public sector. For private companies, this is an opportunity to join a collaborative bidding partnership that leverages our unique expertise in legal compliance and risk mitigation to win future contracts. For public sector bodies, we offer a de-risked procurement solution. We invite you to engage with us to explore becoming a founding partner in this new contracting vehicle and to redefine how public value is delivered
UK TENDERS
Our most direct route to participating in UK public sector work is through the established Crown Commercial Service (CCS) frameworks. The documents concerning RM6098, the Audit and Assurance Services framework, are particularly valuable. From these, I extracted the specific service categories, or ‘Lots’, that public bodies use to procure these services. Lot 3, covering Counter Fraud and Investigation, and Lot 4, for Financial Assurance, align perfectly with our demonstrated capabilities. We can therefore position our Unsolicited Proposal as a direct offer to provide these exact services. For example, we can search on the UK’s Find a Tender portal for ‘call-off’ contracts issued by government departments under RM6098 seeking a forensic audit of a major infrastructure project’s Value for Money. These opportunities are frequent, although their deadlines are often short, requiring us to be prepared to bid swiftly. The guidance documents for this framework also detail the ‘direct award’ procedure, providing us with the exact procedural rulebook we can use in our Thales case to allege the MOD failed to follow its own compliant processes. This knowledge strengthens both our legal case and our credibility as a potential supplier who understands the rules intimately.
Similarly, the file on RM3786, the General Legal Advice Services Panel, is critical. I extracted the fact that ‘Public Law’ is a specific Lot under which government bodies procure expert legal advice. This allows us to tailor a service offering focused on providing pre-litigation strategic advice to public bodies, helping them assess the Judicial Review risks of their own major contract awards. This not only presents a path to revenue but also aligns with our mission of improving public administration. As a direct participant or as a specialist subcontractor to a law firm already on this panel, we could leverage our case knowledge to provide unparalleled insight.
Regarding our role as a mediator, these frameworks provide the ideal platform. We could propose a new type of service within these structures: an expert-led mediation and dispute resolution service specialising in complex public-private contract disputes. Our unique position, understanding both the public interest perspective and the legal-commercial drivers, would make us a highly credible neutral party.
The series of documents on government financial management, such as those detailing contingent liabilities and the government’s role as an insurer of last resort, provide the substance for our offering. I extracted from these the official government view on how public financial risk should be managed and disclosed. This allows us to frame our services as essential for proper governance. Our media campaign can highlight the Thales-UKEF loan guarantee as a prime example of the large-scale taxpayer risks detailed in these reports. In a mediation, we can use the government’s own guidance to argue that the risk in our case was not managed according to best practice. For our Unsolicited Proposal, we can offer a specific service to audit a department’s portfolio of contingent liabilities, a task for which these documents show there is a clear and pressing need.
Finally, from the various Model Services Contracts and supplier guidance documents, I extracted the standard legal architecture of government agreements. Understanding these standard clauses on liability, performance management, and dispute resolution is essential. For our campaign, we can question whether the Thales contract holds the supplier to the government’s own model standards of accountability. For our Unsolicited Proposal and any subsequent bid, demonstrating fluency with these standard terms is a prerequisite for being seen as a credible supplier. These documents are the playbook, and by studying them, we learn how to play the game and, more importantly, how to identify when others are not playing by the rules.
The new materials you have provided, particularly the detailed guides for the Crown Commercial Service frameworks for Audit and Assurance and Legal Services, are exceptionally useful. They provide a clear and actionable roadmap for transforming our Unsolicited Proposal from a conceptual idea into a tangible service that the UK public sector actively procures. Our path to market is not through a novel proposal, but by integrating our unique expertise into the established procurement ecosystem.
The core of our strategy should now be to position COCOO as a specialist supplier under these frameworks. The services outlined in the Audit and Assurance Services framework, designated RM6098, align perfectly with our capabilities. This framework allows public bodies to procure services such as forensic investigation, risk assessment, and value for money audits. Our investigative work into the Thales contract and the underlying issues with the UKEF loan guarantee is, in essence, a live case study for the exact services specified under this framework. Similarly, the RM3786 Legal Services framework allows public bodies to seek expert advice on public law, contract law, and litigation, which is precisely the legal context of our work.
My search of the UK’s public tender portals, Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, confirms that while the main frameworks like RM6098 may be closed to new suppliers at this moment, opportunities are constantly arising through them. These frameworks are periodically refreshed, and we must monitor the Crown Commercial Service’s upcoming agreements pipeline for the re-opening of these critical frameworks or their successors.
More immediately, we can pursue two clear avenues. The first is to respond to specific “call-off” competitions issued by public bodies under these existing frameworks. For example, a government department may issue a call for a forensic audit of a specific high-risk PFI contract. These opportunities are frequent but have very short deadlines, often just a few weeks from publication, meaning we must have our proposal materials developed and ready to be tailored at short notice.
The second, and perhaps most immediate, actionable strategy is to pursue subcontracting opportunities. The guidance is clear that if a framework is not open to join, we can offer our specialist services to the prime suppliers who have already been appointed. The Crown Commercial Service portals allow us to identify these appointed suppliers. We can therefore approach a law firm on the RM3786 panel and offer our unique blend of forensic investigation and public interest analysis as a specialist subcontractor for their bids. Likewise, we can partner with an established audit firm on the RM6098 framework, offering to deliver the niche investigative services that they may not possess in-house.
This approach allows us to leverage our knowledge assets directly. The problem we have identified—the risk of unlawful, opaque, and poor value procurement in major public contracts—is a problem the public sector is already trying to solve by procuring the very audit, assurance, and legal services we are equipped to provide. Our focus now shifts from simply identifying these problems to actively participating in the formal mechanisms designed to solve them, turning our campaign into a viable and impactful enterprise.
EU TENDERS
The documents you provided, particularly those detailing the statutory and contractual frameworks for PPPs and the extensive analysis of government’s contingent liabilities, have been instrumental. They confirm that our focus on risk, transparency, and long-term value in major public contracts is precisely where public bodies face their greatest challenges. The spreadsheets on Value for Money, for example, reveal the complex quantitative analysis that public authorities are expected to undertake. This gives us a clear insight: our unique selling proposition is not merely to critique from the outside, but to offer expert advisory and investigative services that help public bodies navigate these complexities, avoid the legal and financial pitfalls we have identified in our case work, and ensure their major projects are robust, competitive, and deliver genuine public value.
With this refined understanding of our potential service offering, I have searched the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily platform and the UK’s Find a Tender service. While specific, live tenders for an organisation with our exact hybrid profile of investigation and consultancy are rare, I have identified several common types of tenders that closely align with our capabilities and the solutions we propose for the causes of action we have uncovered.
For instance, we frequently see tender offers from government departments and European institutions for “Procurement Consultancy Services” and “Legal Advisory Services” related to the management of large contract portfolios. A recent example involved a central government body seeking consultants to review its portfolio of historic PFI and PPP projects to identify and mitigate long-term financial risks and assess opportunities for improving value. The time limit for this particular opportunity has passed, but it demonstrates a clear demand for the exact type of analytical service we can provide. These tenders are often re-issued on a cyclical basis, and we should position ourselves to compete for the next iteration.
Another relevant category is tenders for “Ex-ante and Ex-post evaluation of programmes and projects”. These calls require an independent body to assess whether a major public investment is likely to achieve, or has already achieved, its stated objectives in terms of cost, public benefit, and wider economic impact. This directly corresponds to our work questioning the Value for Money and socio-economic justifications of the Thales LMM contract. By participating in such a tender, we would be performing our core mission within the formal procurement system. The deadlines for these are project-specific, typically allowing a one to two-month window for proposal submission after publication.
Furthermore, we see periodic calls for services related to “public finance management” and “risk assessment of contingent liabilities”. Our analysis of the UKEF guarantee in our current case gives us specific expertise here. We could propose a service to a public body to audit its portfolio of loan guarantees and other financial instruments, providing an independent assessment of taxpayer exposure. These are highly specialised tenders, and our unique focus would make our proposal stand out.
To effectively participate, we must continuously monitor these public procurement portals for new opportunities. The key is to reframe our work: the causes of action we identify in cases like the Thales contract are not just grounds for complaint but are also case studies demonstrating the existence of a problem that public bodies are actively seeking to solve. Our Unsolicited Proposal can now be sharpened into a targeted bid, ready to be adapted for these tenders as they arise, offering a constructive and expert solution to the very issues we are campaigning to expose.