Surrey tenders £2.5bn highway maintenance contract

Surrey Highways' reactive, routine and planned road maintenance is currently delivered by Kier. The contract started in April 2011 with May Gurney, which was subsequently acquired by Kier. It expires in April 2022.

Surrey is looking to form a deeper relationship with its next contractor.

“Our ambition is for this to create an exciting and new way of delivering highways services,” the county council says in its contract notice. “We are keen to establish a genuine partnership approach which embodies trust in service delivery, pricing and the innovations referenced above, which would potentially take the relationship to a different level. We are open to exploring how we can do things better to facilitate this, including how we involve other parts of our supply chain (and/or other local authorities) to achieve success for all.”

It is also looking for a greater social return. “We are committed to exploring further the wider social benefits which can be realised from significant public contracts,” it says. “We did secure a number of successes with our incumbent supplier but hope to achieve significantly more through this partnership approach. To do this, our ambitions must be aligned with those of our appointed supplier. This means jointly agreeing how this will work and how this can realistically be achieved without adding excessive cost.”

The council is looking to open discussions with four potential suppliers. “Our ambition is to undertake a procurement which is not overly burdensome and facilitates enough interaction with bidders to arrive at the right decision. This is why we have opted to utilise the competitive procedure with negotiation — a process which enables us to interact with shortlisted bidders and provides bidders with a reciprocal opportunity to explore potential solutions with us and obtain detailed feedback on their proposals.”

It is anticipated that the contract term will be an initial 10-year term plus options to extend for a further 11. Estimated value over the full term is put at £2.5bn.

The time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 9^th November 2020.

For further details, see www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/tenders/view/302532

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