Lambeth Council

PFI and PFI Expiry Training Session with Lambeth Council

Brief:

As a result of the Finance Director of Lambeth Borough Council wanting to raise awareness of PFI within their organisation, we were asked to provide an informative and interactive session that would cover the fundamentals of a PFI structure, analysis of the Council's PFI portfolio, the potential implications of not managing the expiry process effectively, and what the Council could do to set themselves up for success.

The Process:

We spent a dedicated session with the Finance Director in order to understand in detail the particular topics they were keen to cover, and understand who was being invited in order to tailor the content and the tone to their particular interests. 

Once we had created an initial draft of the presentation and the content, we shared this back with the Finance Director to get their feedback and adjust the material and our planned approach for the session itself accordingly.

The session was then delivered in person at Lambeth Council’s offices by four members of the Curshaw team, to around 30 attendees. The session was structured as follows:   

  1. Purpose of the session

  2. The history of PFI

  3. Lambeth’s PFI expiry profile

  4. Key components of the expiry management process

  5. Curshaw’s lessons learned from previous expiries

  6. Attendee questions

  7. Conclusion

The session was designed to be interactive, and participation from the attendees was encouraged throughout. Regular points were built in to check in with the attendees, ensuring engagement levels remained high, there were not any points that required clarification, and that the aims of the session were met. In addition, break-out sessions were incorporated to stimulate discussion amongst smaller groups of attendees, with feedback then provided to the wider group. 

The Outcomes:

  • Upskilling of the teams involved in the upcoming PFI expiries, and a consistency in knowledge of the fundamentals shared across those individuals in attendance.

  • New awareness and knowledge of the stakeholders involved in each of the expiring Projects imparted to Lambeth Council.

  • Responses provided from a position of experience and deep knowledge to problems faced by the Lambeth teams grappling with expiry planning.