PFI firm charges £300 for plug work

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A report by the National Audit Office - the official Whitehall spending watchdog - found wide discrepancies in the amounts officials were prepared to pay for even the simplest changes to public finance initiative (PFI) projects.

For instance, the cost of installing a new electrical socket ranged from £302.30 - - three times the £51 to £103 "benchmark" recommended by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors - to just £30.81.

A new lock could cost anything from £486.54 to £15.09, while the price paid for a key ran from £4.26 at the cheapest to £47.48 at the most expensive - a tenfold increase.

While one PFI contractor was prepared to put up a new noticeboard for free, another charged a staggering £149.71.

In all, Government departments and other public bodies spent more than £180 million on changes to operational PFI projects in 2006.

They included £300,000 spent by the Home Office on installing 300 new desks, to a £104,000 bill run up by HM Revenue and Customs for a "space planning facility" to re-configure the layout of its Whitehall offices.

However the NAO said that too often, officials had failed to ensure value for money for the taxpayer.

Edward Leigh, the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee which oversees the work of the NAO, said public sector contract managers needed to be "a lot more street-wise" when dealing with their private sector counterparts.

The Treasury said that it had recently issued new guidance to ensure that full value for money was obtained when changes were made, both for new contracts and existing contracts.