News that HS2 is renegotiating contracts with its suppliers in order to rebalance risk took my mind back to 2010 when the incoming coalition government declared an intention to renegotiate existing contracts with the contractors on major government projects.

My advice was that it would be a mistake. The main reason was the asymmetry of skills between government and the private sector, where I’m pretty sure that government negotiators would leave the room thinking they had come out ahead, while contractors would leave the room actually knowing that they had – probably (tip to government negotiators) as a result of saying “We could agree to that if you would agree to this…”.

It was also relevant that the proposal came from the Cabinet Office, where government’s central procurement resource resides, and my general impression of people bearing the word “procurement” in their government job title was that they were busy destroying value rather than creating it.

This was because they tended to regard procurement as a stand-alone process conducted in a slice of time, with too little attention paid to what was actually being procured, rather than part of a complex system which required them to understand where value resided in the asset or item being purchased and the importance of building relationships with major suppliers.