Council forced to re-tender £50m contract after legal team intervention

Westminster City Council is restart the tendering process for a £50m parking enforcement contract following an intervention by its in-house legal team.

The contract, which was set to be awarded to Canadian company Mouchel, will now be re-tendered under a three-month “accelerated procurement process” after its in-house lawyers said that the council had evaluated the preferred bidder on “price criteria that went beyond what was originally published to tenderers".

A Westminster spokesperson told Local Government Lawyer: "During the standstill period, the bidders were debriefed. At this stage it came to light that there was a flaw in the contract document, the council was using criteria to evaluate price which arguably went beyond those which the council published to the tenderers. As a result the council decided to ensure it was fair and transparent to all those involved in the process and they ended the current procurement process and began a new accelerated procurement process."

Westminster City Council estimates the cost re-running the process will "no more than £100,000", which it says will be recouped by additional savings resulting from the fresh procurement . In the meantime, the contract is being operated by existing parking enforcement provider NSL under "emergency conditons". The terms of the extension are commercially confidential, but the spokeswoman said that "the council is working on the basis that it will be essentially as before, with allowances made for inflation and other variations to reflect the short-term arrangement".

Last week, it was reported that the European Commission had launched an investigation into another multi-million pound parking contract to a different supplier by a joint parking services venture led by Westminster City Council after receiving a complaint that the tendering process contract broke European procurement rules. The re-tendering of the Mouchel contract is unrelated to the contract under investigation by the European Commission.