Highways Services - Term Maintenance Contract

Description

Surrey County Council ('the Council') wishes to put in place a contract which delivers both its core highways maintenance services and also facilitates an exciting and flexible mechanism for the appointed supplier to identify and implement innovative services and solutions throughout the lifetime of the contract.The Council hopes to establish a new way of delivering these services to maximise the potential for success for both itself and the appointed supplier.At present, the majority of the Council's highways maintenance activities are delivered through its existing Term Maintenance Contract which is due to expire in April 2022 and will be replaced with the above-mentioned alternative approach. Lot 1: The Council wishes to put in place a new, exciting and innovative arrangement to facilitate its highways maintenance requirements. At present, the majority of highways maintenance activities are delivered through our core Term Maintenance Contract, which has been in place since 2011 and is due to expire in April 2022. While this has been successful, we recognise that there is an opportunity to build on this success and take steps to identify and maximise the opportunities available to both the Council and the appointed supplier. Leading up to the launch of this procurement, we engaged on an extensive pre-market engagement exercise to develop our thinking around this opportunity which will not only deliver our core highways maintenance needs, but create an environment where the Council and the supplier are able to consider ways to transform the way the services are delivered over time and potentially introduce new aspects to the service. We have considered the very helpful feedback provided by the supplier market and have implemented a number of those suggestions in the design of this process and the contracting approach. It is anticipated that the appointed supplier will not only deliver day to day maintenance services, but may also assist with the design/delivery of major schemes and/or design and implement new innovations connected to the operation of the highways network. Through this opportunity, our ambition is to achieve the following: Encourage and support innovation – we are keen to work with a supplier who is innovative in terms of how our core/continuing requirements are realised, in addition to discussing new ideas and ways of maximising the relationship. Our ambition is for this to create an exciting and new way of delivering highways services. Partnership – 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. Social return – we are committed to exploring further the wider social benefits which can be realised from significant public contracts. 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. A sensible and fair procurement process – 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 a maximum of 21 years (i.e. 10 year initial term plus options to extend for subsequent periods thereafter). We intend to explore the duration of any extensions as part of the negotiation process. The estimated value of this contract is approximately £2.5 billion (made up of the costs in delivering the core element of the services approximately £80m p.a., together with additional monies which may be made available to the appointed supplier depending on the extent to which other innovative services are introduced as further described in the procurement documents). While the services to be provided under this Contract will be primarily for the benefit of Surrey County Council, the appointed supplier may be presented with opportunities to provide similar/connected services for the benefit of other UK local authorities.