Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-06-17
Buyer: Department of Health and Social Care
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 72000000
Estimated value: 136300000 GBP

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
The Department of Health and Social Care (‘DHSC’) intends to extend for approximately 2 years, its IMS3 contract with Atos IT Services UK Ltd entered into on 16.1.2012 (the ‘Contract’) for the purposes of supporting orderly transition and termination, following a period of at least 10 days of this notice.
The contract is for the provision of bundled IT services to DHSC as customer and other NHS bodies (‘Consuming Organisations’). Services include service management; service integration; security; sustainability; infrastructure support and enhancements; hosting; connectivity; end user tools; enterprise content management; collaboration; video conferencing; remote flexible working; telephony; print services; user access management and access devices; end user support; training and education; procurement; project services; applications enhancements, maintenance and support; business change; business intelligence; design authority; service improvement and innovation.
DHSC (or the Department of Health as it was then known) entered into the Contract on 16.1.2012 with Atos IT Solutions and Services Limited following a further competition procedure under NHS Connecting for health's additional supply capability and capacity framework (the ‘framework’).
The contract was originally let as a 7-year arrangement comprising a 5-year initial term (‘Initial Term’) and 2-year optional extension period. In June 2017, DHSC availed itself of the optional extension right and extended the contract for a period of 2 years (‘First Extension’). The current Contract expiry date is 30.4.2020 (‘Current Expiry Date’).
The original value of the contract was 76 000 000 GBP for the Initial Term and 30 300 000 GBP for the optional First Extension.
DHSC has undertaken an extensive process of analysis to identify the optimal delivery approach for future IT support for DHSC and consuming organisations, following which it has been decided that the contract should be disaggregated and replaced with a new multi-sourced target operating model (‘TOM’) which is about to be procured by the Future Services Portfolio (‘FSP’), a team within NHS England.
The service lines and assets under the contract will become a ‘legacy’ service tower under the TOM and the ‘legacy’ service tower will diminish over time, aligned to the end of the contract.
In order to enable the transition to the TOM, it has become necessary to extend the contract again (‘Second Extension’) by approximately 2 years because:
(i) The TOM will not be fully ready in time to allow the services provided under the contract to be transitioned to it before the current expiry date. Creation and delivery of the TOM is complex and requires the achievement of a number of transition and transformation objectives, as well as organisational change (e.g. the creation of a new Future Services Organisation (‘FSO’) to manage the TOM services) and this is likely to take at least a further 12 months beyond the current expiry date;
(ii) the level of technical transformation and remediation required of the services under the contract in order to transition to the TOM is not feasible within the current term.
Other minor and incidental technical changes to the contract are required as part of the second extension. These changes include: amendments of relevant timings to ensure that they reflect operational realities; exit and services transfer arrangements to reflect the requirements of the current situation and reducing the amount of time required for termination of certain service towers; reviewing obligations to upkeep certain software; and termination assistance.
The second extension was not provided for in the initial procurement. The advertised contract did not anticipate the provision of services beyond a maximum 2-year extension period. It was not known at the time that cabinet office would introduce policy to avoid large, single vendor IT outsourcing contracts and instead encourage multi-vendor, disaggregated environments, combined with in-sourcing where appropriate, and require the adoption of a cloud-first approach, such as has been adopted by the TOM.
A change from Atos to another supplier cannot be effected by or before the Current Expiry Date for both technical and economic reasons. This is due to the nature and complexity of the current IMS3 IT infrastructure and estate, the necessary transitional activities and the significant service disruption and cost that will arise in the event of a premature transition. For example, it is not possible to migrate data such as unstructured files without Atos’ support and knowledge of the IMS3 data-centre infrastructure and configuration, because Atos’ support and knowledge is needed to ensure access is made available and legacy identities are matched to new cloud identities.
For the reasons set out in II.2.4 above, DHSC considers the intended Second Extension to be permitted under Regulation 72(1)(b) of the PCR 2015:


Winner: ATOS IT Services UK Ltd
Award value: 136300000