Gloucestershire Highways Professional Services Procurement

Gloucestershire County Council is publishing early-stage market information on intent to procure highways professional services. The current contract expires in March 2025 and the intent is to award a single core contract with a four-year term, potentially with the opportunity to extend based on performance. The core contract will be supplemented with a specialist supplier framework.

The County Council has estimated that highways professional services will be worth £20-60 million over the four-year contract term. The intent is to procure a sole core contract with the following scope:

Core Lot: Major Projects, Infrastructure and Transport Planning
• Highways Major Project development and supporting delivery (comprising of projects on the strategic highway network, local major projects and major infrastructure projects)
• Highways Infrastructure inspections, design and supporting delivery (highways structures, drainage, and geotechnical schemes)
• Core Transport Planning services and Economic Advice

It is anticipated that the above workstreams will constitute in excess of £5 million of work per annum.

Specialist Supplier Framework
It is anticipated that the core contract will be supplemented with a multidisciplinary framework arrangement aimed at specialist suppliers for the following non-core services:
• Traffic and Road Safety Engineering
• Transport planning services on the wider strategic highway network
• Parking and Traffic Regulation Orders
• Traffic and Signal Modelling
• Flood risk management
• Landscape and Ecological advice
• Technical environmental advice on planning applications
• Specialist highway structures inspections/surveys and advice
• Ground investigation

The expectation is that the framework will have a value of in the order of £500k to £1million per annum. Whilst the County Council may call on the specialist suppliers to provide the above non-core services, at the Council’s discretion the work may be awarded to the sole supplier under the Core lot if the work is within scope of that contract.

Programme
We expect to issue a formal prior information notice (PIN notice) to alert of the opportunity shortly. A Find a Tender notice for the core contract will be issued in September via Pro-contract / Supplying the South West with a view to issuing tender documents in early Autumn and awarding the contract in late 2024/early 2025.

A selection questionnaire will be used to shortlist tenderers ahead of an assessment based on a quality/price assessment with a social value response through the Social Vale Portal. We expect to stagger the procurement of the Specialist Supplier Framework with the procurement commencing in late Autumn 2024. The contract form for all contracts will be under the NEC4 suite of contracts.

We are seeking input from suppliers and would appreciate your answers to the questions posed in the Market Intelligence Submissions section of the Project,