Telecommunications services

Tender description

The Contracting Authority will enter into a contract variation following a period of 10 days from the date of publication of this notice. The original contract (the contract) was awarded pursuant to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Framework RM1045 Network Services to Vodafone Ltd for the provision of mobile voice and data services as defined in Lot 6 of the Framework Agreement. The contract variation is for an increase in data usage and consequent increase in price and adaptation of pricing model, further details of which are in the Section II.2.4 of this notice. The contract was awarded pursuant to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Framework RM1045 Network Services to Vodafone Ltd for the provision of mobile voice and data services as defined in Lot 6 of the Framework Agreement. The contract is for a term of 2 + 1 years at a cost of 491 976 GBP for the initial 2-year term. Since the contract was awarded the Contracting Authority has had an unexpected increase of usage in its mobile telephony services that could not have been foreseen. As a result of this increase in data usage (from 5 TB to approximately 7 500 000 GBP Tb), a consequent increase in price and adaptation of pricing model have become necessary. This increased usage to this service was unexpected and was unforeseen. In particular, the number of devices used by the Council has increased markedly, from 6572 devices to 7578 with data usage per service user increasing also. As a result of the unexpected increase, the Contracting Authority requires a variation to the contract with the existing provider of the service. The modification to this contract does not affected the contract’s overall nature and the value of the contract variation is less than 20 % of the original contract value. The value of the variation is as stated in II.1.7. The contract value following the variation is 599 263 GBP. The provision of this service is critical to the Contracting Authority’s operations as a local authority where the need for instant mobile communications is vital to the delivery of its operations for staff and service users. The Contracting Authority considered the options available in respect of the procurement for these additional services but concluded that for reasons of expediency, these limited additional services should be provided by the existing provider. For the reasons set out in Section IV, the Contracting Authority considers the proposed variation is permitted in accordance with the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR).