The long and winding road

I am aware that this is merely one of hundreds of similar crazy OJEU-inspired procurement procedures, but it illustrates the way in which the process is subverting the product:

Dear Mr Cox,

I am writing as a potential interested party in your OJEU advertised project to complete your CLC project and remodel your Cosham campus. I understand that you intend to appoint a new team post Stage D and that the architect and structural engineer would then be novated after stage E to a design-and-build contractor. The Cosham project work will be taken over from a feasibility study.

I realise that you may feel as limited by the bureaucratic nonsense of the OJEU process as the rest of us, but it is hard to see how your interests can be best served at this stage of the development process by introducing a completely new team to the project or how the wider professional communities interests can be served by having to, in the first instance, complete a whole raft of prequalification questions with supporting documentation and subsequently for the shortlisted firms to submit a tender and attend an interview.

The suspicion of course is that this is for you just a necessary procedure aimed at satisfying the bureaucracy while retaining the team you have already chosen to carry out the design stages.

As you may have gathered, we will not be submitting a proposal.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Thomson, Rivington Street Studio