Forest Management and Invasive Vegetation Control

Tender description

This Prior Information Notice (PIN) serves to alert the marketplace to a potential opportunity for Forest Management and Invasive Vegetation Control services to Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), and it is requesting information from the marketplace in order to refine our requirements. Lot 1: FLS currently procure Forest Management and Invasive Vegetation Control services through a number of medium-term contracts (up to four years including extensions) and various other contracts awarded through Framework Agreements. Our objective is to bring together all of these requirements into one Scotland-wide tender through which we will award a number of contracts (Lots) based on appropriate locations and our programmes of work. Forest Management includes services such as; Planting (including Restock and Beat-up), Cleaning, Respacing, Weeding, Spraying. Invasive vegetation control includes services such as; Cutting and burning; foliar, stem and stump treatment with pesticides, steep ground / rope access work. We anticipate the new tender will be published in August 2021 with contracts awarded in January 2022 so that work can start from the 1st April 2022. The structure of this tender and how it might be divided into Lots will be guided by our market research and data analysis; one aim of this tender is to reduce unnecessary administration and duplication of effort (both for FLS and suppliers) that currently exists across our portfolio of contracts. Health and safety is at the forefront of all our working in FLS and we aim to contract with safe and competent suppliers that can plan with us to strategically deploy and supervise their resources safely, effectively, sustainably, and be capable of adapting these plans where action is needed to adjust our programme. We are seeking your views about how we can build our tender to deliver our aims whilst also making FLS an attractive customer to work with. With this in mind, it will help us to understand any barriers that you foresee may hinder your ability to bid for this work, such as difficulties with recruiting, planning and pricing. We also seek to understand if there are other innovative ideas within the marketplace which we might consider. We look forward to hearing your views to help us shape our strategy and we thank-you for engaging with us to help us deliver our Forest Management and Invasive Vegetation Control. Additional information: There is no requirement to have read or replied to this notice and the survey. This notice is not a call for competition (tender) and will not be used for the evaluation of suppliers; this is for information and market engagement only.