Seven million pound highways contract awarded without competition or scrutiny

The Royal Borough of Greenwich council has awarded a £7m highways maintenance contract without a competitive procurement process using the same ‘urgent’ award procedures used by the Department of Health during the COVID-19 pandemic to purchase billions of pounds of PPE..

The local authority has published a Voluntary ex ante transparency (VEAT) notice disclosing the award of the contract to its incumbent highways maintenance provider, JB Riney, for 12 months utilising the ‘negotiated without a prior call for competition’ procedure without prior advertisement or competition of the contract opportunity.

Regulation 32 of the Public Contract Regulations rigidly ring fences the use of this procedure to “unforeseen events” that an awarding authority did not cause, due to the anti-competitive impact of direct award contracts.

Yet, this is precisely the reasoning that the council has published in its VEAT notice to the market which states that due to ‘unforeseen events that occurred prior to the end of the contract, a competitive tender exercise could not be organised’ [italics added for emphasis].

Adding insult to procurement process injury, Highways magazine, which originally reported this story, reports that the council has also blocked the decision from being 'called in' by the relevant scrutiny committee of the local authority.

The council competitively awarded its previous contract to Riney in 2013 which ended on 31st March 2022.

JB Riney bears no responsibility for the failure of the council to correctly, and timeously, run a legally compliant procurement process.

Photo © Stephen Craven and licensed for reuse under cc-by-sa/2.0.