This is a contract result notice, not an open opportunity. Details from the official award data.

The project objective is to benchmark Network Rail's operations and support costs against national and international comparators to identify and quantify any gap to the most efficient infrastructure managers across the range of activities identified in Section 2.1.

The proposed methodology should consider the most appropriate way to do this, including whether different comparators and approaches should be used for the two areas of expenditure. (For example, there may be opportunities to benchmark support costs against national infrastructure managers and international rail infrastructure managers.) We anticipate that this work will focus on between 5 and 10 comparators in each area of expenditure.

We expect the analysis for each area to include identifying structural factors, explanatory variables and any factors relevant to understanding any efficiency gap. (For example, in the case of railway operations, consideration may be given to complexity of rail infrastructure and type of signalling technology employed.) We expect that international benchmarking will primarily focus on Europe.

But we invite bidders to propose the comparators and explain their reasoning.

We will provide or facilitate provision of Network Rail data as required, but we expect the contractor to collect / provide data for comparators.