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Dear Mr Pragnell,

Thank you for your email of 6 February 2014 requesting the following information:

It has been reported in Private Eye that KPMG was awarded a contract worth £30 million without any competition on the back of an existing contract worth £1 million.

Please provide any paper or extract from a document that justified the award of this contract without competition in terms of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006.

I am treating your correspondence as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.

A search for the information has now been completed within the Ministry of Defence (MOD), and I can confirm that information in scope of your request is held.

Information about the award of this contract is already available online through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU). Specific information on this contract extension was provided in the Contract Award Notice, which is available at the following link: http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:103386-2012:TEXT:EN:HTML. This notice explains that the amendment increases the value of the contract and outlines why the contract was extended without competition. Because the information is already available to you, under Section 21 of the Act (Information accessible by other means) the Department is not required to provide information separately.

Under Section 16 of the Act (Advice and Assistance), you may wish to note that the original contract, which was for business analysis consultancy services relating to the MOD Cost Assurance and Analysis Service Development Programme, was let in competition and a number of suppliers submitted bids. The contract was advertised as three lots with a total value of £12M. KPMG was ultimately successful in winning the contract. The original advert, which gives more detail about the requirement, is also available on the OJEU website at the following link: http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:85097-2010:TEXT:EN:HTML.

If you are not satisfied with this response or wish to complain about any aspect of the handling of your request, then you should contact me in the first instance. If informal resolution is not possible and you are still dissatisfied then you may apply for an independent internal review by contacting the Deputy Chief Information Officer, 2nd Floor, MOD Main Building, Whitehall, SW1A 2HB (e-mail ). Please note that any request for an internal review must be made within 40 working days of the date on which the attempt to reach informal resolution has come to an end.

If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may take your complaint to the Information Commissioner under the provisions of Section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act. Please note that the Information Commissioner will not investigate your case until the MOD internal review process has been completed. Further details of the role and powers of the Information Commissioner can be found on the Commissioner's website, http://www.ico.gov.uk.

Yours sincerely,

Defence Equipment & Support Secretariat

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