'Closing a PPP - the discipline, not the decoration'

A Public-Private Partnership is usually won or lost long before a bidder opens the documentation. The work that decides the outcome is early, unglamorous, and easy to skip — which is exactly why it is worth doing.

David Crowley, CEO  ·  March 2026  ·  6 min read

There is a comfortable assumption in infrastructure procurement: that a Public-Private Partnership succeeds on the strength of its bid — the polish, the renderings, the launch. The evidence points elsewhere. Closing a PPP on time and on budget is a function of work done long before bidders ever see the documentation. The decoration is what everyone can see. The discipline is what closes the deal.

That early work is unglamorous. It is defining an output specification that can actually be measured, rather than one that simply reads well. It is allocating each risk to the party best able to carry it, and pricing honestly what cannot be transferred. It is building a financial model that will survive forensic review, not one that merely balances. And it is aligning the evaluation matrix with the things that genuinely determine value, so that the competition rewards the right behaviour.

Take the evaluation matrix. Bids are scored against it line by line, not read in the round. A matrix that rewards the wrong things will produce the wrong winner, however good the projects beneath it. Getting that matrix right — before the market ever sees it — is a modest piece of work that shapes a contract lasting 25 years.

None of this is visible at launch, and all of it takes time that programmes rarely feel they have. Political timetables reward going to market; they do not reward the weeks spent structuring beforehand. So the structuring is compressed, and the gaps are left for the bidders — and later, for the lenders — to find.

The cost then arrives late, between preferred bidder and financial close, when the risk matrix meets due diligence and the assumptions meet a lender’s scrutiny. That is the most expensive place to discover a problem. Months are lost to renegotiation, value leaks out of the deal, and some transactions — sound on paper — simply fail to close.

The remedy is not more documentation. It is earlier discipline. A risk allocation that survives lender review is far cheaper to build at the outset than to repair at the end. An output specification written to be measured saves a decade of disputes in operation. A model built to a forensic standard earns a lender’s confidence — and competitive terms follow. The work compounds quietly, in the project’s favour.

Done well, a Public-Private Partnership is one of the most efficient procurement instruments a government has. Realising that potential is not a matter of decoration. It is a matter of the discipline applied long before the documentation is ever written.