# A BIM-Based Value for Money Assessment in Public-Private Partnership: An Overall Review
## Overview of Value for Money Assessment
### Review of VfM Assessment Contents
#### 3.3.2 VfM Quantitative Assessment  
As the vital assessment used to reflect the economic benefits of a project, the quantitative measurement may be a central issue when processing the VfM. Unlike qualitative appraisal, quantitative assessment in VfM requires the more direct computation of the PPP or PFI project's costs against a public-sector comparator (PSC). The PSC is based on a fictional model or an existing reference project, created using traditional models of public sector procurement. A PSC analysis is conducted from the programming level until financial close [33]. The calculated cost value, if using PPP as the procurement model, must always be less than costs likely to be incurred in a traditional public procurement model (shown in Figure 6). This must be achieved to a specified degree so that the special purpose vehicle (SPV) can be assured of sufficient motivation to action the business outlined. In addition, the calculated value should be continually updated as a clear picture of the risks that emerge over time [34]. Figure 5: The qualitative assessment workflow in China [30]. The calculations of the VfM from the quantitative assessment were closely related to the net present value (NPV) of the entire project lifecycle. The current model in the UK used the indicative present value for both PPP options and PSC value, with a traditional model providing public service assessments. Specifically, the PSC represents comprehensive scenario-setting that should achieve a level sufficient to reflect the procurement strategy. Many countries accept it. The UK government took the lead in standardising PSC content as a decision process to define where, when, and how to use privately financed infrastructure solutions [35]. According to the UK National Audit Office, a method of computing both PSC and PPP is continually updated. The critical component of the indicative present value in PSC focuses mainly on the cost of resources, transaction costs, and adjustment on tax and optimism bias. With the development of PSC accounting, the constitution of PSC now can be divided into four parts: the raw PSC value, the value of risk transfer, retention value, and competitive tax adjustment [36]. In the quantitative assessment content, the raw PSC value is related to the resource-based costs, as shown in Figure 6. The cost of project design, construction, operating, and maintenance must be added to consulting service fees related to the project. The capital income as the property transfer fees or user fees should be deducted. To eliminate the advantages of public ownership, the value of competitive neutrality adjustment is used to modify the tax and responsibility cost to the public sector to achieve equality of competition [37]. It is worth mentioning that adaptive risk allocation and management indirectly affect the PSC value in the PSC calculations, which requires a reference project to be set up. This project is assumed to use the traditional procurement approach rather than the PPP model. The main advantage of the PPP/PFI model is that a considerable degree of risk may be transferred to the private sector. Therefore, these costs should be added in the traditional scenario in the PSC calculations. The value of transferable risk is converted to a net present value using its occurrence probability in most of the cases, as shown in Table 5.  
Figure 6: Structure for the quantitative assessment in the VfM process. PSC: public-sector comparator and LCC: lifecycle costs. The PSC-based appraisal procedure is now regarded as the most effective benchmark for measuring the quantitative aspects of the VfM. However, its value has been disputed [38]. The current calculations are not holistic, and the extent of its synchronisation with the project lifecycle is still under development. There is no doubt that such a VfM quantitative assessment is supposed to remain its objective along the project lifecycle and has clear steps and procedures. It is anticipated that different computing methods are used at various project stages.