Supply of Warehouse Services

Tender description

The rationale for the bonded warehouse services was to provide bonded warehousing for the safe storage of crucial PPE products purchased by DHSC in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This was part of an urgent requirement and response to the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuring that PPE, which was required to be distributed across the country was safely stored for DHSC in Shanghai while DHSC arranged for the PPE to be transported to the UK. The contract provides bonded Warehouse services in Shanghai and was a direct award pursuant to Regulation 32 (permitting the use of the negotiated procedure without prior publication on the basis of extreme urgency as a result of the pandemic). A formal written contract was not finalised with Uniserve at the outset of this arrangement but the agreement was formalised and signed in January 2023 with a term of 30 October 2020 to 30 September 2022. Lot 1: Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, DHSC considers Covid-19 to be a state of urgency that has been brought about by circumstances which a diligent contracting authority could not have foreseen. This was also confirmed by the European Commission. A response to the pandemic was therefore required in order to safeguard public health risks and risk to life by securing safe and continued provision of PPE and thus, provision of storage of that PPE. <br/>Accordingly, DHSC entered into a contractual arrangement with Uniserve for the provision of PPE storage from October 2020 to 31 March 2021 with extensions to the arrangement from April 2021 to September 2022. The award of this contract followed the negotiated procedure without prior publication pursuant to Regulation 32 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, relying on Regulation 32(2)(c) ‘extreme urgency’.