SC23181 Kent County Council Highway Term Maintenance Contract Market Engagement

Kent County Council - SC23181 Highways Term Maintenance Contract (HTMC) Market Engagement

Kent County Council (KCC) is the statutory authority responsible for the delivery of a highways service for the residents of Kent (excluding Medway and trunk roads and motorways). Highways and Transportation (H&T) is the intelligent client that is delegated responsibility for maintaining all highways assets for KCC.

Within H&T, the Highways division delivers the operational services for highway related asset maintenance. The total value of all Highways Assets is currently estimated at £25bn.

Within these asset areas there a number of contracts commissioned to the external market. While a number of the contracts are asset specific (e.g. streetlighting and road asset renewal, the Highway Term Maintenance Contract (HTMC) delivers services across several teams, including those beyond Highways such as flood risk management and KCC infrastructure teams.

The current HTMC, which has been awarded for a period of 32 months and expires on 30th April 2026. This is supplied by Amey Highways Limited and commenced 1st September 2023. This follows a twelve-year contract with Amey (formerly Enterprise (AOL) Limited). The current contract is estimated to be worth £50m per annum as it delivers a number of key services which includes the following:

• Winter Service Provision – i.e. gritting/salting of our major routes during freezing conditions and ploughing during snow events.
• Drainage Maintenance and Capital Projects – i.e. gully cleansing and capital drainage repairs
• Structures – i.e. bridge repairs and maintenance, tunnels and construction of new structures
• Highway patching and small- to medium-scale road asset renewal works – i.e. potholing and patching of the highway
• Pavement asset preservation services – i.e. carriageway and footway life extension treatments
• Emergency Response – i.e. respond to emergencies across the network due to weather, emergency services support, vehicle collisions and structural asset failure both in hours and out of hours, 24/7/365.
• Highway Improvement Scheme Delivery – i.e. construction of schemes for crash remedial measures, engineering and traffic schemes and s106 requirements

Contractors who wish to express an interest must submit a brief overview of works and services they can provide. This is to be no more than three A4 pages (no less than font size 11) detailing their services, experience and past performance, previous clients and demonstrate what they could contribute should they be invited to take part in this market engagement exercise. The Council will use these submissions to select suitable organisations to be invited to the events. Information regarding the exercise will be communicated to the invited organisations including full details of the process.

The requested information must be submitted via the Kent Business Portal no later than 12pm (noon) on Thursday 11th January 2024. The Council will inform the selected organisations in preparation for the Market Engagement Events that will take place on the 24th, 25th, 26th January 2024. Organisations not invited as part of this process will not be precluded from applying to take part in the Council's chosen procurement strategy and updates on our findings will be shared in due course.

Should the Council decide to proceed with a procurement process for a contractor/’s to deliver these services, new contractual arrangements will need to be in place from November 2025 to allow time for implementation and to ensure service continuity from May 2026.