Turning Contractual Challenges into Collaborative Relationships.

Ian Denison spent the best part of two decades fixing public sector contracts and estates before founding Inscyte. Here is what that work taught him, and why the clock is now the enemy for both sides of the contract.

I have spent nearly twenty years in the rooms most people would rather avoid. Contract negotiations, performance management, payment mechanisms and PFI disputes – including ‘make-good’ negotiations with facilities contractors who’d rather you didn’t read the small print. It is not glamorous work. It’s the work that quietly decides whether a school keeps its lights on, its heating functional, or its toilets flushing and its budget intact. Unfortunately, under PFI that basic control is out of the hands of schools. 

In 2007 I founded Community Partnership Projects to put that right: we walked into complex public estates and found the money, minimised the risk and unlocked the opportunity that everyone else had stopped looking for. 

The pattern I discovered never really changed. 

The gap where public money goes to die.

Take the local authority sitting on three PFI contracts it did not fully understand. We led the negotiations and took £20 million off the table, money that went back into public services. 

Take the seven schools coming out of a Building Schools for the Future deal, where a compliance audit we built found more than £500,000 a year in failures the contractor had been quietly neglecting to resolve. 

Take the academy handed a fair settlement instead of a bad one. 

And take the school that got its building because someone chased down £1 million of funding nobody believed was there.

I’m not listing this to impress anyone. I’m listing it because every one of those numbers came from the same place: the gap between what a contract says and what happens on the ground. That gap is where public money goes to die.

PFI isn't complicated. It's opaque.

People think PFI is complicated. It’s not, not really. It’s deliberately opaque, which is a very different thing. The contracts are long, the payment mechanisms are detailed, and the gaps in the contract can inadvertently incentivise the provider to keep it that way. Clarify the agenda, hold the contract up against what is actually being delivered, and the myths on both sides of the fence quickly fall away. Most of the value we have unlocked over the years was never truly hidden. It was just misunderstood or wrongly interpreted.

It cuts both ways.

That said, it’s not a one-way street. The FM contractor is often in an unenviable position at the latter stages of the PFI contract. All too often money has already been stripped from the financial model, and it’s the FM contractor who is trying desperately to balance a reduced financial envelope against a key period of lifecycle investment. Too often, this turns into a strategy of disinvestment, as we have seen on a number of PFI expiries, such as Stoke. 

And right now, that gap is about to get a great deal wider.

700 contracts, one cliff edge.

There are more than 700 PFI contracts across the UK, and they are all heading for the same cliff edge: expiry. Most of the organisations holding them have no real plan for the day the contract ends and the building comes back into their hands. At the same time, the Department for Education has drawn a line in the sand on estates compliance for 2026, digital data standards for 2028, and a platform that will make every school's estate performance public. The era of quietly muddling through is over.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone running a public estate. The contract will not wait for you to be ready. Expiry is a date, not a negotiation. Arrive at it without a plan and the plan gets made for you, and it rarely favours the public side.

I care about this for a reason that has very little to do with contracts. When an estate works, the people inside it can get on with what actually matters. A school where the building is safe, compliant and affordable is a school that can spend its attention on its children instead of on its crises. The estate is not the dull bit behind the education. It’s the foundation the education stands on. Get it wrong and everything above it starts to wobble.

Why I stopped being a one-man fixer.

That is why I stopped being a one-man fixer. Community Partnership Projects joined forces with MDG Associates, and Inscyte is what we built. It brings the contract expertise together with the compliance, the data and the energy intelligence a modern estate needs, in one place. Not because it makes for a tidier business, but because the problem grew too big to solve one negotiation at a time.

My challenge to you.

So this is my challenge to every estates director, trust leader and council chief reading this. Do not wait for the letter telling you the contract is ending. Do not assume the compliance box is ticked because no one has told you it is not. Open the contract. Walk the estate. Find the gap before it finds you.

I have spent twenty years proving the money is almost always there for the important things. The only thing you cannot get back is the time. The way forward is a genuine partnership between the public and private sectors, one that acknowledges each side's requirements and risks and works towards the best outcome for both.

Ian Denison is a Director of Inscyte, a specialist PFI and estates management business. Inscyte helps schools, trusts, councils and NHS bodies manage, negotiate and exit PFI contracts, stay compliant, and get more from their estates.

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