Handback Is Coming. Is Your Authority Ready?

Over 200 PFI and PPP contracts, together worth an estimated £160 billion, will reach expiry within the next ten years. For many contracting authorities, PFI Cos and Service Providers, this is unfamiliar territory. Nobody currently in post negotiated these deals, and the skills built up during the PFI programme's peak years have largely moved on. Handback is not a form-filling exercise at the end of a contract. It is a multi-year, cross-disciplinary undertaking that starts long before anyone thinks the "end" is in sight.

In March 2026, NISTA (the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority) published a suite of contract management guidance building on the IPA's 2022 "Preparing for PFI Contract Expiry" guidance and 2025 Asset Condition Playbook. The message across all of it is consistent: expiry planning should start at least seven years before contract end, and organisations that leave it later risk losing negotiating leverage at exactly the point they need it most.

What does "ready" actually look like at seven years out? Four things, in our view.

• First, you need to understand what the contract actually requires of all parties at handback — not what you assume it says, but what it specifically says, tested against how it has actually been operated for the last twenty-odd years.

• Second, you need a reliable picture of asset condition. NISTA's Asset Condition Playbook recommends a full survey around five years before expiry, but the groundwork — assembling base data, agreeing how the survey will be run and paid for — starts two years before that.

• Third, you need to manage the relationships that will determine whether handback is adversarial or collaborative — the PFI Co, funders, FM providers, and your own internal stakeholders all have a role, and all need managing well before anyone reaches for a dispute process.

• Fourth, and easy to lose sight of amid the contractual detail: the people using the buildings and services need continuity. A hospital, school or prison does not pause while ownership changes hands.

If your authority has a contract reaching expiry in the next decade, the most useful thing you can do today is ask a simple question: if expiry were tomorrow, would you know exactly what you're owed, what condition the assets are in, and who needs to be in the room? If the honest answer is no, that's where to start.

For queries, further information or a conversation about PFI handback readiness, planning and support, please get in touch with steve.hanson@monaghans.co.uk