Accounting Separation Plan and Implementation Advice

Tender description

Key Tasks This requirement will be wholly or mostly internal to Ofwat. Although it is possible that you might have some meetings and/or visits to water companies, we do not expect this to be significant. • Meeting with the Director of Accounting and understanding the requirements • Meeting/ interviewing other regulatory accountants within Ofwat to understand the range of views, issues and experience to draw upon • Meeting/ interviewing the key economics/ policy leads for the relevant work-streams within the Water 2020 programme. This will be a key activity, with the objective of understanding the economic/ regulatory objectives of their proposals and translating them into financial informational needs. • A desk based review of previous Ofwat price reviews and Water 2020 consultations, to inform your plan and proposals for implementation. • Drafting outputs (see Deliverables below) • Discussion of outputs with key internal stakeholders within Ofwat and revision/ refinement of them as a result. Key Deliverables The Supplier will be required to produce the following deliverables, which fall into three phases. Phase 1: Developing a plan for Accounting Separation. • A plan for our Accounting Separation work, in the short, medium and long-term. • This should specify and explain the key activities that we need to undertake, the key issues to watch out for and the key water companies and other stakeholders to engage with. • It should also include a detailed monthly timetable (for the next two years) and quarterly thereafter, including milestones, people resources and external spend/ resources. • A key part of this work will involve identifying and understanding our regulatory and economic objectives and translating these into Accounting Separation and other financial informational needs. The output would be a draft and final written report, with the option for Ofwat to meet the Supplier and suggest changes in between. We envisage this Phase being around 2 weeks’ work. Phases 2 and 3 follow from Phase 1 and we note that we may need to revise/ alter them significantly, depending on the result from the Phase 1 plan. Phase 2: Implementation – Recommendations and Advice. The Supplier should develop detailed recommendations and advice as to how we implement the plan. This will involve discussion with Ofwat and will be iterative/ evolve as we start to work on implementation over the next three months to March 2016 and beyond. The output will be meetings with Ofwat and short memos (2/3 pages) on each recommendation/ issue, as we work through them. Timescales: we see this as taking up to approximately 30 days over the three months January – March 2016. Phase 3: Range of options to include in May 2016 consultation on Water 2020. The Supplier should provide us with a menu of options and alternatives for us to consider for inclusion in our May 2016 consultation.