Transparency data

Freeports programme: Annex B - Freeport decision-making process

Updated 6 March 2024

Assessment and an appointable list

Freeport bids will be marked by officials in relevant departments in line with the published criteria outlined in the Prospectus. Bids will first be reviewed against the pass/ fail criteria, and then the 5 scored (high, medium, low) criteria (trade and investment, regeneration, innovation, deliverability and private sector involvement). Marking guidance has been prepared to ensure consistency. A full moderation of those assessments will be done and recorded within assessor teams, and also across assessor teams to ensure consistency.

Officials will determine the list of appointable bids based on the moderated scores for the Communities Secretary and the Chancellor’s consideration. As set out in the published Prospectus, bids will be included on the appointable list where they score:

• at least a Medium on criterion b (Regeneration)
• no more than one Low across the five criteria, and
• a High on at least one criterion

The prospectus also set out that ministers’ (Communities Secretary and the Chancellor’s) decisions on bid selection from the appointable list would be based on the assessment (provided by officials) of the 5 criteria outlined above.

In line with the prospectus, ministers will also factor into their decision-making context-sensitive information relevant to the objectives of Freeport policy. The 7 considerations were set out in the prospectus. An information pack, and assessment of how strongly the 7 considerations apply to bids will be provided by officials alongside the appointable list. Officials will also provide details of bids that did not make the appointable list and why for information, and an equalities assessment of the bids.

The appointable list will also be shared with Department for Transport, Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for International Trade (now Department for Business and Trade) who can choose to write in with views to you on bid selection by 25 February but will have no formal decision-making role.

Decision-making

Following the public commitments that have been made in the prospectus there are 5 firm principles that need to be adhered to for legal reasons. These are that:

• only bids on the appointable list can be selected
• assessment scores can’t be changed
• the selection of bids must be justifiable in terms of the scores they received from officials and the 7 additional considerations, and nothing else. Those considerations must also be applied consistently
• justifications for selected will need to be recorded and published. We will also need to record the rationale for unselected bids
• should you feel any conflict of interest arises (e.g. a site in your constituency, or a firm involved in a bid which you have an interest in) you must declare it in line with the Ministerial Code and advise the Permanent Secretary. If a clearly identifiable and significant constituency or personal interest in a Freeport bid is identified, our recommendation will be to recuse yourself from the whole decision-making process, by delegating the decision to another minister in the department

To aid transparent fair decision making, we also advised taking account of the following guiding principles:

• all else being equal, bids with stronger assessment scores on the appointable list are understood to be stronger. Therefore, selecting a lower scoring bid from the appointable list should be justified in terms of one or more of the additional considerations
• ministers can disagree with officials’ assessments of bids’ performance against the additional considerations but should justify this in their rationales
• in applying the additional considerations, ministers can draw on relevant personal knowledge, and the contents of the information pack provided this is reflected in their rationales and is done consistently for all bids
• where the context specific considerations are applied, ministers should apply those consistently across all bids

Ministerial meeting to agree Freeport selection

The Communities Secretary and the Chancellor will meet on the 26 February 2021 to consider their selection of bids from the appointable list and the rationale for those (in the context of the assessment scores from the 5 criteria and consideration of the 7 context specific factors).

We recommended that HM Treasury and Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government officials attend that meeting to ensure that we can evidence that the meeting considered all relevant information and no irrelevant information. Having officials in the meeting means that we can prompt you to explicitly consider things you must consider or clarify reasoning that could be misconstrued by an unsuccessful bidder. We also recommended the following broad structure to that meeting:

• review the assessments against the criteria of appointable list, noting relative strengths and weaknesses of the bids
• review your additional rationale, as set out in the information pack and assessment, and discuss their relevance/ strength and how they may apply consistently to all bids in the appointable list. Legally, you are not committed to considering all, or even any, of your additional rationale
• review the equalities assessment and discuss how that might be relevant to the final decision
• bringing these three elements together, discuss a shortlist of potential winners
• review that shortlist and identify seven prospective winners
• discuss whether there is a case for designating extra Freeports (i.e. an eighth or ninth) and, if so, which bids those would be

Following that meeting the accounting officer will review the proposed selection to ensure the department has complied with the accounting officer tests. Time to do that is limited – we ideally need to have reviewed and agreed that by the Monday 1 March 2021. The Communities Secretary will then be asked to set out his recommended final selection and rationale in writing to the Chancellor who will formally approve and announce at budget. Once the announcement of successful bids is made at budget, the rationales for those will be published. And we should expect to be asked to publish rationales for unsuccessful bids also.