Highway maintenance work

Tender description

Surrey County Council (the Council) wishes to put in place a contract which delivers both its core highways maintenance services and also facilitates an exciting and flexible mechanism for the appointed supplier to identify and implement innovative services and solutions throughout the lifetime of the contract. The Council hopes to establish a new way of delivering such contracts to maximise the potential for success for both itself and the appointed supplier. The Council has undertaken some preliminary market engagement with a range of established suppliers in this market. While this has been extremely useful, the Council wishes to expand on this work, discuss its current thinking and ensure it is in the best possible position to launch a formal procurement process later this year. The Council therefore wishes to commence a pre-market engagement exercise with potential suppliers as more fully described in Section II.2.4) below. This notice marks the commencement of a further pre-market engagement exercise to conduct final consultations with potential suppliers with expertise in successfully delivering similar services and to obtain general feedback on the Council's proposed approach to the procurement exercise. A pre-market engagement document has been produced by the Council (a copy of which is available by issuing a request via the email address set out above) which explains the potential scope of the opportunity in further detail. In summary, at present, the majority of highways maintenance activities are delivered through the Council's core term maintenance contract. This contract has been in place since 2011 and is due to expire in April 2022. While this has been a successful contract, the Council recognises that there is an opportunity to build upon these successes and take steps to identify and maximise the opportunities available to both the Council and the appointed supplier. We recognise the challenges involved in delivering highways services and appreciate that there are a number of lessons learned which are important to maximise the success of the next iteration of this contract. Our ambition is therefore to achieve the following: Encourage and support innovation – we are keen to work with a supplier who is innovative in terms of how our core/continuing requirements are realised, in addition to discussing new ideas and ways of maximising the relationship. Our ambition is for this to create an exciting and new way of delivering highways services. Partnership – we are keen to establish a genuine partnership approach which embodies trust in service delivery, pricing and the innovations referenced above, which would potentially take the relationship to a different level. We are keen to understand how we can do things better to facilitate this, including how we involve other parts of our supply chain to achieve success for all. Social return – we are committed to exploring further the wider social benefits which can be realised from significant public contracts. The Council has realised a number of successes in the previous iteration of this contract with our incumbent supplier but hopes to achieve significantly more through this new partnership approach. To do this, our ambitions must be aligned with those of our appointed supplier. This means jointly agreeing how this will work and how this can realistically be achieved without adding excessive cost. A sensible and fair procurement process – as a local authority, we are obliged to comply with the public procurement regime. While we hope that this offers assurance that you should expect us to run a fair and transparent process, our ambition is to also undertake a procurement which is not overly burdensome and facilitates enough interaction with bidders to arrive at the right decision. Our pre-market engagement document explains how we propose to do this in further detail. In terms of the activities which will take place over the next few weeks, the Council's pre-market engagement exercise will consist of a combination of: (i) a webinar (to take place at 11.30 a.m. on 8 July 2020) (places can be reserved by responding to the email address set out above); (ii) considering responses to a short questionnaire (accessible via the email address above – deadline for responses: 5 p.m. on 13 July 2020); and (iii) potentially 'one to one' consultations with selected suppliers who respond to the questionnaire and whose response would benefit from some further clarification (scheduled to take place w/c 27 July 2020). Further information on the activities to be conducted during the pre-market engagement exercise and our current thinking on the procurement process more generally can be found in the pre-market engagement document referred to above.