Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2017-03-10
Buyer: Health and Social Care Information Centre (known as ‘NHS Digital’)
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 31712113 | 32000000 | 32400000 | 32412000 | 32412100
Estimated value: 109700000 GBP
Award criteria: Price, Quality

Technical requirements: Price
Quality
The Health and Social Care Network (‘HSCN’) Transition Network (‘TN’) is a network to enable transition of legacy services from the N3 Agreement (‘N3’) infrastructure into the HSCN environment.
The HSCN TN will be connected to the future HSCN Peering Exchange service to allow telecommunication connectivity between Health and Social Care organisations and third party organisations.
The Law: Regulation 32(2)(b)(ii) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 allows for the negotiated procedure to be used without prior publication where competition is absent for technical reasons. The Authority's aim is to exit N3 that has operated securely for 13 years. The Authority needs to build a standards based, disaggregated, virtual network infrastructure capable of supporting the current and future needs of the NHS. The resulting HSCN must be capable of processing secure traffic and there must be near zero service impact from transition. Due to the unprecedented scale of the transition activity required, and the need to minimise the risk of service interruption or security breach, it is technically necessary to enter into transitional arrangements with BT. The Facts: The reason the contract has been awarded without prior publication in the OJEU is that it was necessary in order to secure the continued provision of services contained within N3. Whilst other services from N3 have been terminated or are being migrated, together with the creation of wholly new elements of HSCN, it was an unacceptable risk for services to be transferred at the same time given the scale of this transition task. Despite terminating N3 in March 2014 it proved necessary to work with BT in the contractual termination period to extricate the NHS from BT. Due to scale of the task, and the necessity of first establishing HSCN prior to commencing transition, the transition process has not been completed in the run off period and it is therefore necessary to enter a transitional agreement in order to secure the controlled transfer of customer contracts to HSCN. From a technical perspective the safest and therefore appropriate course was a transitional period in which services under the old contract remain with BT whilst this contract runs down in a managed and controlled manner as the system transfers to HSCN. It is necessary that TN continues to operate from April 2017 to provide continuity of critical services until c 14 000 circuits are migrated to HSCN. Due to the scale and importance of this task to the NHS, it has not been possible to migrate away from reliance on BT without a transitional period. Recreating robust network infrastructure from the bottom up would require considerable time (and thus require an extension of the existing service) and place an additional activity burden on the Authority and increase the risk relating to continuity of service. Whilst Government has decided that in order to improve competition overall, services such as N3 should be disaggregated, this must be done in a way as not to put the operation of the NHS at risk. Changing the supplier of N3 whilst also migrating the other services under N3, make the risk profile unacceptable in the context of service continuity and risk management. The scope and term of what has remained in contract has been reduced to what is required for service continuity. The contract model also envisages that items can be removed from scope during the ongoing migration.


Number of bids: 1