Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-03-05
Buyer: Department of Health and Social Care
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 63521000
Estimated value: 885000 USD
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: The provision of freight services for the supply of personal protective equipment and medical equipment.
This notice has previously been published in ‘Find a Tender Service’ (FTS), the UK e-Notification service. Publication in the Official Journal of the European Union was delayed by a technical issue on behalf of the EU publications Office, which has now been resolved.
1) The consequences of not responding rapidly to the pandemic to meet the exceptional increases in demand for PPE to protect care providers and key workers, and medical products to treat patients, would be a significant excess illness and deaths in the UK.
2) Huge increases in global demand, export restrictions from various nation states all contributed to a shortage of product availability. Where product could be sourced it was imperative that this product was moved at the earliest opportunity to prevent it being sold to higher bidders.
3) The urgent need for PPE and medical products in the UK created a requirement for the fastest mode of transport. Air freight transit times were in the region of 4-5 days whereas sea freight was between 56-84 days.
4) The disruption to freight and exports from China following their lockdown and export restrictions led to the severely restricted availability of freight capacity.
5) The market for air freight was particularly disrupted by the cancellation of many scheduled passenger airline flights (removing significant air freight capacity from the market). This created a situation where there was severe lack of physical air freight capacity and dramatic cost inflation in this market.
6) No pre existing government commercial agreements were identified which covered the nature and scale of the services required.
7) This contract was awarded to Air Charter Service to meet a specific urgent need to transport PPE to the UK, utilising flights from BKK – DSA during June and July 2020. The Department is content the tests permitting use of the Negotiated procedure without prior publication (Regulation 32(2)(c)) are met:
2) It is responding to Covid-19 immediately because of public health risks presenting a genuine emergency.
3) The events that led to the need for extreme urgency were unforeseeable: The Commission itself confirmed: ‘The current coronavirus crisis presents an extreme and unforeseeable urgency – precisely for such a situation our European rules enable public buyers to buy within a matter of days, even hours, if necessary’.
4) There was no time to run an accelerated procurement under the open, restricted or competitive procedures with negotiation that would secure services within the required timescales.
5) The situation is not attributable to the contracting authority: It has not done anything to cause or contribute to the need for extreme urgency
ACS is a brokerage company-this contract is therefore subcontracted to another company-details withheld because to do so would breach specific confidentiality agreements and would aggravate relationships with their service partners


Winner: Air Charter Service Ltd
Award value: 885000
Number of bids: 1