Professional Services to coordinate and disseminate the Price & Cost Indices (PCIs) for the Departme

Descriptions

The UK Shared Business Services Ltd, formerly known as RCUK Shared Services Centre Ltd (and referred to throughout this document as RCUK SSC Ltd) is acting on behalf of the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS)Analysis Directorate is part of the United Kingdom Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It is responsible for collection of statistics relating to the United Kingdom construction industry, publishing them in a variety of formats, and promoting their use to achieve improved performance of the industry.The Directorate wishes to appoint an external contractor to provide the following service:Production and dissemination of construction Price and Cost indices. This is a well-established service using proven statistical series. It contributes to the statistics produced by United Kingdom government departments, and is used by public and private sector clients and their contractors to manage and monitor the costs of contracts. The price and cost indices are published and sold on a quarterly basis.The contractor will be responsible for.Defining and maintaining statistical methods that will deliver the most reliable results consistent with preserving existing series.Identifying the sources of data, and making the commercial arrangements for data collection.Arranging for publication and dissemination of standard reports.A consultation exercise followed an independent review of PCIs. The contractor will be required to work with BIS in implementing the accepted recommendations. Chief among these was the establishment of a working group comprising government and industry representatives to oversee the future development of PCIs. The contractor would be expected to help set up such a group and work with it to establish ways of modernising the PCI series.The contractor will work under the general direction of the Head of Construction Statistics within BIS' Analysis Directorate, who is responsible for all major policy decisions regarding the service. Contractors are expected to have a policy of continual improvement to the service and to initiate proposals, where appropriate. Where such proposals affect the content or presentation of the data, they should be discussed and agreed with the Head of Construction Statistics.Funding arrangements will assume that the contractor can implement efficiency savings and decrease direct funding from BIS over the life of the contract.