EXCLUSIVE: First 83 pages of Wirral Council’s Highway Services Contract with BAM Nuttall

John Brace

8 years ago

EXCLUSIVE: First 83 pages of Wirral Council’s Highway Services Contract with BAM Nuttall

In 2013, Wirral Council’s Cabinet on the 7th November decided to award the Highway Services Contract to BAM Nuttall (which started on the 1st April 2014). BAM Nuttall won the contract out of three companies that bid for it and they replaced the previous contractor Colas. The contract runs from 2014 to 2018 and has an estimated value of £30 to £33 million (£6 to £6.6 million a year). You can read the Cabinet report that led to that decision and the Internal Audit report and Gateway 3 report (along with the recommendations/action plan for both of those) on Wirral Council’s website.

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At a meeting on the 7th November 2013 Wirral Council’s Cabinet spends less than two minutes deciding on awarding the £30 to £33 million Highway Services Contract to BAM Nuttall (that agenda item starts at 1m 40s)

This year was the first year I could request a copy of the BAM Nuttall contract during the audit and I’ve scanned in the first 83 pages (of a very long contract). The Highway Services Contract is for:

the provision of standby and call-out, reactive and preventative maintenance on all parts of the highway, public car park and coastal defence infrastructure for which Wirral Council is responsible, including: carriageways; footways; gully cleaning and drainage; street lighting and electrical services; traffic signs and road markings; street and coastal defence furniture; bridges; subways and retaining walls and sea wall and accesses; together with snow and ice clearance; including precautionary salting except for

maintenance of traffic signals equipment and their electrical supplies, all maintenance and improvement schemes estimated in value at over £250,000 and the provision of gritting vehicles and road salt.

The documents below cover the parent company guarantee with Koninklijke Bam Groep N.V. (no that’s not a spelling mistake but the name of a company based in the Netherlands), then the start of volume 1 (part 1) of the contract documents which covers form of agreement, bond (unfortunately the details haven’t been filled in on this), form of tender, declaration, what information is considered commercially sensitive for freedom of information requests, information assurance, insurance certificate (with AXA Corporate Solutions), parent company letter guarantee, contract data part 1 (data provided by Wirral Council, partnering information, more contract data on the optional parts of the contract (pages 62-63 add optional clauses about FOI requests) which includes matters such as TUPE, subcontracting, intellectual property, data protection, human rights, the Local Government Ombudsman, price adjustment for inflation and other optional clauses/changes to the contract).

Below are thumbnail images of the contract pages. The text on the thumbnails is just about readable on my laptop screen. If there are any pages that you find it’s not readable please leave a comment with the page number and I’ll link the thumbnail to a higher resolution image for that page.

The optional contract clauses added about FOI requests seem to mean that if a FOI request is made for information about or relating to the contract, that Wirral Council will contact BAM Nuttall and ask it to make representations if it wants information to be withheld. Page 24 of the contract classes the following parts of the contract as "commercially sensitive" which are Contract Data Part 2, The Price List and the Fee Percentage Schedules.