Supplier pulls out of bid for HA contract

12 December 2007

A supplier of spreaders has pulled out of bidding for providing winter service vehicles for England’s trunk roads and motorways, claiming the Highways Agency had made unreasonable demands.

Econ Engineering, which had successfully completed the pre-qualification and quality submission stages, refused to comply with the HA’s insistence on a specific testing procedure for its vehicles.

This would require examining spreading accuracy, which was likely to have to be repeated, given wind conditions, it said. This demand ‘would have meant that the high standards of manufacture, delivery and service our customers have come to expect would have suffered,’ said Andrew Lupton, Econ sales director.

Econ also supplies spreaders for the Transport for London winter service contracts, which started in October, trunk road contractor BEAR Scotland, and a number of county council contractors including Ringway in Kent and Balfour Beatty in Essex.

The British-owned company, based in North Yorkshire, claimed that the vehicle-testing requirement was overly resource-intensive and unnecessary. It highlighted the finding from TRL – which designed the tests in the 1980s – that ‘scientific testing in a road environment is fraught with difficulty… influences outside of experimental control can often lead to difficulties when interpreting the results’.

Lupton, speaking to Surveyor, said: ‘We withdrew from the process so as to not befall the same fate as the two previous successful contractors for the HA’s winter fleet contract.’ Atkinson and Telstar had both ceased trading following difficulties in passing testing requirements, he said, which was why Econ had proposed safeguards to allow the company to maintain current levels of service to existing customers, and to develop new products.

But a spokesman for the Highways Agency said: ‘We work to strict conditions for government procurement. We could not accommodate certain conditions the company put to us, so we rejected Econ’s tender as being non-compliant with the instruction for tenderers. ‘We cannot comment further at this time as we are still in the procurement process with other bidders.’

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