Waste and Street Cleaning Contract at Last

Next Monday, the Executive will finally make a decision on the new waste and street cleaning contract, which is due to come into force in April next year.  Although this is the final stage, the negotiation has gone on for the best part of a year.  Indeed, if you count the meetings I and the then Council Leader had with Veolia about these issues, the whole thing goes back more than two years.

Complexity
The sheer complexity of procurement now is not widely appreciated, and too much for one post.  I think I will be doing multiple posts on this subject as it is so central and deserves more attention.  The Social Value Act requires the Council to pay regard to social and environmental effects, and the Equality Act demands attention be paid to the various "protected characteristics" under that legislation.  This is the reason for much of the (to me) fascinating demographic details at the back.

We also decided to bundle a wide range of services together, including _ street cleaning, waste collection, maintenance of parks and services for BHP _ making it all even more complicated.  The whole thing was done under what is called a "competitive dialogue procedure".

I recall going through one of the many drafts of the specification well before Christmas last year, which is when the process officially started with an OJEU notice (a kind of official advertisement).

Stages
We then went through the various stages, which are standard to all procurements of this type.  We had the pre qualification questionnaires, which are intended to make sure all the bidders have the basic ability to fulfil a contract of this complexity.  Then bidders were invited to put in their suggested outline solutions, which they did in February and March.  The next stage saw the number of bidders reduced to three, who were asked to give more detailed solutions.  This was in April.  The bids were then evaluated and the final tender held in July.

All this involved extremely detailed, and I am told extremely gruelling, discussions between the bidders and a team of Brent officers, leading the recommendation for Veolia ES (UK) Ltd on Monday. 

I think the rigour of the process can be seen in the final report.