Ms Anne Stewart:

For example, an Oracle system may have been installed, which is a huge investment and it is the core enterprise resource planning, ERP, system. That may not be something that you would put back out to tender in five years' time because the investment is greater than if you were to change. Another example is where the contract that had been in place has expired and you have run out of options to extend it but that may be because of a challenge to the new tender process that you were trying to put in place and, therefore, you had to continue on with the existing contract until that tender gets re-run. There are cases where you can award a contract in a non-competitive situation but it may not necessarily be non-compliant.

In the case of something like school buses, because there are many of those types of companies then certainly that should be competitively tendered. Unfortunately, because I do not have the background on that particular one I cannot say for sure it was not tendered.