Provision of Regulatory Reporting Advice

Description

Development of Business Plan guidance, templates and definitions for collection of data from Scottish Water Lot 1: Regulatory accounting and transfer pricing rules 1. Refresh of regulatory accounting rules covering the regulatory financial statements that Scottish Water prepares for WICS. The refresh is expected to cover areas such as (i) the allocation of expenditure between operating and capital expenditure; (ii) the definition of the different categories of capital expenditure, including optimised replacement, enhancement and growth; and (iii) recording all potential liabilities being stored up for future generations of customers, including any difference between the how much Scottish Water should be spending to replace assets each year on average (based on asset values and expected asset lives) and what it actually spends to replace assets in that year). 2. Review of the rules in place to underpin intra-company transactions or transactions with associate entities, including requirements for market testing and full cost recovery. 3. Develop guidance, data templates and accompanying definitions to show Scottish Water’s current and forecast performance in the areas above, including operating and capital expenditure. Lot 2: Engineering and asset management Development of guidance, data templates and accompanying definitions in several areas, including, but not limited to: (i) levels of service performance; (ii) the current asset inventory, focusing on the distribution of assets in each asset category by age profile; (iii) asset replacement interventions, with reference to the asset inventory, using the age profile of the assets in each category as a proxy for targeting proposed replacement interventions; (iv) enhancement and growth investment, removing the element of investment that relates to the replacement of any existing assets and setting out the outputs to be delivered from each proposed project, when those outputs will be delivered and at what cost. The contractor will need to assist WICS with developing the definition for enhancement and growth investment, versus asset replacement investment, which would then feed into the definitions for the updated regulatory accounting rules; (v) current costs for standardised capital projects (previously known as the cost base), which was used to estimate the scope for procurement efficiency in previous regulatory control periods; and (vi) base assumptions such as growth.