Archaeological services

Tender description

Highways England (HE) is the government company charged with operating, maintaining and improving England's motorways and major A roads. We have a huge road investment programme to deliver and want to engage with suppliers to inform our approach to procuring our infrastructure projects. Supplier feedback and providing for genuine two-way dialogue opportunity to take place between HE and the market, listening to what interested parties have to say and using this to shape the project and procurement development is extremely important to us; it is imperative that we work collaboratively to achieve the optimum solutions. The archaeology framework is required to ensure that archaeological remains are preserved and recorded where new roads, motorway widening projects and trunk road improvements are built by providing appropriate archaeological expertise, advice on design and contract documentation, supervising, monitoring, search and recovery and reporting progress on all stages of work. The framework is anticipated to have a 4 year duration, with the focus on delivery of archaeology services nationally on the Complex infrastructure programme (CIP) and Regional infrastructure programme (RIP). The framework will be divided into lots, although the lot structure and strategy is still to be confirmed. The primary objectives of archaeology framework are to: — development of archaeology strategies, written schemes of investigation and negotiations with stakeholders during the consenting process for major projects, — delivery of trial trenching to support the consenting process and watching briefs during works by statutory utilities, ground investigation contractors and others, — delivery of major programmes of archaeological investigation and associated post excavation conservation and reporting. Commencement of services is anticipated for 2020 for a duration of circa 4 years. We envisage this framework will be enabled for Highways England Tier 1 contractors to use. Highways England intends to use an e-Sourcing portal (Bravo) to communicate and undertake further market engagement activities for the above scheme. Please register on the portal if you have not already done so, in order to be involved in market engagement, the following URL will direct you to Bravo https://highways.bravosolution.co.uk/web/login.shtml