Consultant Negotiator Supporting Voluntary Bilateral Contract For Difference

Contract award notice between BEIS and GETF Services to provide:

expert senior commercial advice and act as the senior commercial negotiator in discussions with energy generators. This input will significantly strengthen the credibility and commercial expertise of the government's negotiating team in discussions with energy generators, and play a core role in devising and delivering the government's negotiating strategy.

This expert senior commercial advice will also help inform the policy design and structure of the CfD agreement - to ensure the best VFM outcome for consumers/taxpayers.

Additional information:

The government is faced with an energy crisis due to global gas prices increasingly massively, in large part because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent reduction in gas output. This increased gas price is flowing through to the electricity market and non-gas fired generators are now benefiting from extraordinarily high electricity prices when their cost of operation is unchanged. Under the direction of Ministers, officials have been instructed to seek to negotiate revised contracts for difference with renewables obligations generators to sever the link between electricity and gas prices to reduce consumer bills as soon as possible. This needs to be undertaken at great pace to mitigate costs this winter, meaning negotiations are already under way. This will require deep policy development and analysis to bring together policies that can deliver on government's objectives. However, it will also require deep commercial energy expertise and commercial negotiation experience. Whilst officials under the direction of Ministers will oversee and direct negotiations this individual will bring his decades of commercial experience in the energy sector to bear in negotiations to challenge senior energy company executives (CEO level), sell the benefits of the government proposal and set out the commercial realities of a failure to accept. He will also play a key role in shaping negotiating strategy ahead of such sessions. This individual is exceptionally well placed to do this having consulted across and negotiated with the commercial energy sector for decades and has previous experience of supporting government policy development at the highest levels. He also has strong existing relationships with the analytical teams being utilised to support the policy development.

Given the urgency and specificity of the work we were justified in awarding under regulation 32 of the Public Contract Regulations.