MGCC Working at Height

Concepts

• construction work
• height safety system
• bristol
• medium girder bridge
• height
• mgcc
• manufacture
• bridges
• mgb

Location

Bristol

Description

manufacture and procurement of a working at height safety system for the Medium Girder Bridge (MGB) sets

Award Detail

CPV Codes

• 45221100 - Construction work for bridges

Indicators

• Award on basis of price and quality.

Legal Justification

The Operational Infrastructure programme team, part of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), intends to place a Contract with WFEL Ltd for the provision of demonstration and manufacture of a working at height safety system for the Medium Girder Bridge (MGB) sets which was not included in the original MGB Manufacture Contract. The length of the contract will be 4 and the value approximately £3.85M. This safety system has become necessary because standard safety equipment and systems of work across all bridge configurations are now required to ensure compliance with current Working at Height legislation (WaH). The current risk to life from a WaH accident during construction of an MGB is a Class C risk. In order to comply with Health and Safety Executive (HSE) legislation based on Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) the Army (as the employer) must do all they can to reduce the risk of working at height (WaH) to ALARP. The value of these additional works is less than 50% of the value of the consideration payable under the original contract. In accordance with regulation 4 of The Defence and Security Public Contracts (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (SI 2019/697) this procurement falls to be regulated under the provisions of the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011 as amended (in particular by SI 2019/697 and SI 2020/1450). Prior publication of a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union is no longer appropriate. It is considered that the award of the contract without prior publication of a contract notice in the UK e-notification service is lawful in accordance with Regulation 16(1)(d)(i) of the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011 additional works. These additional works cannot for technical reasons be carried out or provided separately from those under the original contract without major inconvenience to the MOD because the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has already been contracted through an Assessment Phase Contract to investigate and propose a WAH Safety Solution. The End User (Army) have paid for and reviewed this proposal and are content that it will meet the WaH legislation and wish to proceed with WFEL’s proposed solution which is currently being developed into a prototype ready to trial. Any deviation from this chosen solution will cause a time delay to the introduction of critical safety equipment and be an economic and resource inconvenience to the Authority. Additionally, following a thorough investigation, the Master Data Packs for MGB (containing all the necessary technical information for a competent engineering company to manufacture the bridge sets) are not available to the Authority to provide to a 3rd party. Therefore a 3rd party supplier would need to design and engineer a WaH system from the ground up without access to any of the MGB technical information. This would result in significant design and production line set up costs and carries a performance and quality risk of components being incompatible with the existing MGB system. As WFEL are the OEM for the MGB, they will have no such incompatibility issues. The Cyber Risk Profile for this requirement identified by the Cyber Risk Assessment is Very Low. Reference 600646679.