Highways England has awarded four contracts worth more than £300m for work in Cumbria and North Lancashire, and the North East of England.
Kier Highways Limited and a CH2M Costain joint venture have won two new style Asset Delivery maintenance and response contracts worth up to £262m and running for up to 15 years.
The contracts use a new format from Highways England that was launched in the East Midland’s region in July this year, following difficulties with its Asset Support Contracts (ASC), which were designed to replace the Managing Agent Contractor (MAC) model with a more flexible system.
Under the new Asset Delivery format, Highways England directly manages both routine maintenance and the delivery of capital renewal and improvement schemes.
This marks a major shift to bringing key functions in-house and taking greater control of the road network.
Starting on 1 April, Kier Highways Limited will operate in Cumbria and the CH2M Costain Joint Venture will work in the North East, delivering a range of services including routine highway maintenance, repairs to defects, emergency incident response and severe weather services.
Highways England also announced that two new five-year design services contracts, expected to be worth over £38m, have been awarded to Amey OW Limited for both the Cumbria and North Lancashire, and the North East areas.
The work will also run from 1 April 2017 and includes preparing technical designs and supporting capital projects from an initial scheme feasibility phase through to the as-built phase.
David Poole, executive director for commercial and procurement at Highways England, said: ‘The awarding of these four new contracts builds on the new way of working already taking place in the East Midlands and is a real change in the way we have previously operated the network. These contracts demonstrate our commitment to increasing capability and understanding within Highways England and bringing Highways England closer to our customers.
‘Collaboration with our supply chain is key to our new way of working and we are looking forward to establishing a successful, long-term relationship with the appointed contractors.’
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