DIO Awards Estates Contracts Valued at £1.1bn

The Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) has announced that it has awarded contracts valued at £1.1 billion for the Next Generation Estate Contracts (NGEC) National Housing Prime, National Training Estate Prime and Scotland and Northern Ireland Prime Contracts.

DIO has awarded contracts to the following companies:

• National Housing Prime contract (NHP) valued at £626m to CarillionAmey (Housing Prime) Ltd
• National Training Estate Prime contract (NTEP) valued at £322m to Landmarc Support Services Ltd; and
• Scotland and Northern Ireland Prime contract valued at £152m to CarillionAmey Ltd.

The three contracts have been awarded on a five-year year basis with the option to extend up to an additional five years.

The contracts provide planned and reactive maintenance including grounds maintenance and have capability to deliver additional professional services, low value capital works and capital projects up to a value of £3.93 million. The contracts ensure sites continue to be kept safe, legal and operational at all times.

The award of the three contracts represents a major milestone in the NGEC programme and this will be followed shortly by the contract award of three further Regional Prime contracts for the Central, South East and South West of England, which are due to be awarded in June 2014.

Matt Foley, DIO Head of Future Procurement said: “Over the last 10 years, DIO has rationalised our contracting arrangements from over 250 to six manageable NGEC Prime contracts in 2014.

“These are designed to deliver value for money for Defence and the tax payer through a coherent set of firm priced contracts, which further improves financial stability. I look forward to working closely with our new Prime contractors and I am confident that the companies selected will meet the high standards required on the Defence estate.”

Major General Mark Armstrong, DIO Director Service Delivery said: “DIO’s priority is to support our Armed Forces by providing the places they need to live, work, train and deploy on operations. Prime contracts have not only been designed to provide operational capability at all times, but are flexible enough to adapt to future requirements of the defence frontline; allowing for service requirements to be changed in a timely and cost effective way.”

In line with MOD’s continuing commitment to providing decent accommodation for military personnel, the NHP represents a national contract covering more than 49,000 military homes across the UK. The new contract replaces a number of different, existing contractual arrangements to support Service Families Accommodation (SFA).

This contract has greater scope than previous maintenance contracts, as it provides additional services for managing move-in, move-out services, housing allocations and the installation of furniture and fittings.

There has been a great deal of progress made in the delivery of accommodation services to Service personnel and their families, including: improving the standard of accommodation; the introduction of an online application system; patch management; and using survey data to improve our customer service. DIO’s aim is that the NHP will build on these successes over the lifetime of the new NHP contract.

Britain’s Armed Forces depend upon the training estate to prepare for operations. The NTEP contract will deliver a range of technical support, maintenance and repair service and soft facilities management, including catering and a training range booking service. The NTEP contract will manage over 190,000 hectares ofUKtraining estate, used by up to 30,000 Defence personnel each day.

The Scotland and Northern Ireland Prime Contract will deliver repairs and maintenance services to the built estate, as well as security maintenance services across 30 sites in both countries. It replaces the current Regional Prime Contact forScotlandand two contracts delivering routine maintenance work in Northern Ireland.

Both the NTEP andScotlandand Northern Ireland Primes are due to be in service by November 2014. The NHP will be implemented through a phased mobilisation programme by December 2014.