Grounds Maintenance and Gardening Servces

Description

First Garden Cities Homes Limited is an English Registered Provider of Social Housing. We were formed on 1 March 2020 through the amalgamation of Howard Cottage Housing Association and Welwyn Garden City Housing Association, two organisations with a combined history of over 170 years of providing affordable homes. Howard Cottage HA was established in 1911 to provide affordable housing in Letchworth, the world's first Garden City, whilst the eponymous Welwyn Garden City HA was founded fifty years later for the same purpose. Today, First Garden Cities Homes is a modern, dynamic 2400 homes housing association with an active development programme and deep roots in its communities. Our current contract for the Grounds Maintenance and Gardening Services services expires on 31/12/2026 and there is no option to extend or renew in a manner compliant with the Procurement Act 2023. We are now starting the process of procuring a new contract to provide the services. A GIS mapping project has already been commissioned to ensure that we have the most accurate information available about the scope and volume of the works at approximately 65 locations across North Herts and Beds. This will be completed prior to tender publication and form part of the tender pack. We are now accepting expressions of interest for participation in a market engagement exercise ahead of publishing a tender. The requirement will be divided into two lots of broadly similar volume, organised by geography, to create a manageable scale of delivery for providers of different sizes. Our homes sit within a Garden Cities context, and the appearance and condition of the grounds are central to the identity of these places and to the pride residents take in them. A consistently high quality, well presented standard of finish is therefore essential, and we do not believe this can be achieved through solely unskilled labour. We will expect at least some of the operatives attending site on every occasion to hold relevant horticultural qualifications or demonstrable equivalent experience, and we are interested in how providers structure and deploy their workforce to meet this standard reliably. Environmental responsibility and social value matter to us. We welcome approaches that advance environmental initiatives across our sites, and we are keen to understand how SMEs can be supported to compete to further our social value aims. We also invite innovation. We want to hear how providers would bring new methods, technology and ideas to improve quality, efficiency and sustainability. We are currently undertaking a consultation exercise with our residents to understand the levels of quality and detail they expect from the service, and the outcome of that work will inform our final specification. Once this is complete we will contact interested parties to arrange meetings to give potential suppliers the opportunity to shape this procurement.