Highway toll services

Tender description

Highways England is in the early stages of developing a scalable free-flow charging solution for commencement of live service between 2021 and 2024, which will include schemes such as Dartford-Thurrock River Crossing. The solution would be a potential enabler to realising any longer term aspiration of interoperability between charging schemes and a smarter integrated service for the customer. Highways England wishes to speak to the market to gain their insights and experience in this field which will be fed into the development and make-up of the scalable free-flow charging solution. Highways England is exploring different ways of breaking down the services required to develop and deliver a scalable free-flow charging solution and wishes to discuss these with the market. The services that would make up the solution would be: 1. Implementation of vehicle detection and identification solutions, which will be used as the basis of the charging and enforcement scheme(s). 2. Design, construction, configuration, integration and testing of scalable IT systems, including all custom and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software and the provision of physical infrastructure to support the free-flow charging solution. 3. Charging operations services, which includes the operational elements of the scheme including: charge payment processing, enquiry and complaints handling, account registration and management. A number of channels for the customer to pay, register and make enquiries; these can include but are not limited to online and contact centre. 4. UK and foreign enforcement operations services which include validating contravention candidates before raising penalty charges for non-compliance with the relevant scheme, issue of Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) and the management and processing of all enforcement related customer queries, payments, representations, appeals and debt recovery. This includes interaction with key government third parties to enforce the free-flow charging scheme(s). We anticipate the following industries will be interested in this opportunity: — tolling and free-flow charging providers, — CCTV and ANPR camera manufacturers, — intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) providers, — field engineers and maintainers, — contact centre and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, — civil enforcement and debt management providers, — payment solution providers (e.g. merchant acquirer services), and — software vendors. Highways England are currently considering a number of potential routes for acquiring each of the packages indicated, including: — utilising internal capabilities, — utilising existing public sector shared services, — utilising existing contracts, — procuring through Government framework agreements, and — procuring through OJEU procedures.