A case officer in the building authority calculates in-house delivery at the hourly rate the budget prescribes, and overlooks the two years of delay that the same work would never have cost on the open market.
In German procurement practice, value for money is usually narrowed down to the bid price. Delay costs, opportunity costs, and quality costs generated by late or mediocre in-house delivery rarely appear in the calculation at all, even though Section 7(2) of the Federal Budget Code (Bundeshaushaltsordnung, BHO) has long required a complete economic efficiency assessment.
The statute realigns the burden of proof. It demands justification for in-house delivery once the market demonstrably delivers more efficiently — budget law that has stood for decades, yet is rarely applied with any rigour in administrative practice.
A partnership in this sense remains under state control. The state stays the client, the director, and the owner of the outcome; the market delivers execution, held to account through contracts, metrics, and an acceptance process worthy of the name.
“PPPs do not fail because of their economic logic, but because of a state culture that places in-house delivery above efficiency as a moral matter.”
An official who approves a partnership needs cover for the day, years later, when it becomes politically inconvenient. A central clearing body with its own methodology and its own mandate could institutionalise that cover, rather than negotiating it case by case. In the end, the real question remains who the state measures itself against when it builds.