Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-05-06
Buyer: The Secretary of State for the Home Department
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 32500000 | 32523000 | 32524000 | 45232332 | 48200000
Estimated value: 297000000 GBP
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
In December 2015, following advertisement of the contract in the OJEU (on 18.4.2014, reference 2014/S 077-133654), the home office entered into a contract (“the ESN Lot 2 contract") with Motorola Solutions UK Ltd (“Motorola”) for the development and roll-out of a Public Safety Communications Solution (“PSCS”) application which is to be installed on users’ mobile devices, as part of the Home Office’s ESN project. The solution is to be used by emergency services staff. It is to replace the UK’s current “Airwave” PSCS, which uses old technology and is costly. The new solution will provide (amongst other things) “push to talk” functionality and new data services over an existing mobile network (on a prioritised basis).
This notice relates to an intended variation to the original contract (see Section II.2.4 below for a description of the variation).
Under the existing contract, the main services provided by Motorola are: design of the application; interconnection with the mobile network services procured by the home office from a network provider under the “ESN Lot 3” contract; user service/profile management; device management (provision of SIM cards, etc); customer support and service management (capacity planning, availability planning, etc).
— the contract period is to be extended. Its original term is due to expire, insofar as extension options in the original contract are exercised, on 8.12.2023. The variation will extend the term to December 2024 in order to fully rollout the solution to the users and to avoid the risk of impacting on the benefits of the service to the users,
— the delivery approach and timetable will be amended to be incremental (rather than "big-bang") and the payment profile will be aligned to this to incentivise delivery,
The total value of the contract will be 401 000 000 GBP which is an increase from the previous 319 000 000 GBP which includes the original OJEU value of 294 000 000 GBP and 25 000 000 GBP of previously agreed changes.
The need for these changes has arisen because the ESN project is delayed and therefore changes are required to the delivery timetable. Further the change from Wave 7 000 to the already working Kodiak product de-risks delivery and enables the programme to move to a standardised solution faster. The incremental approach enables user benefit to be achieved earlier than under a “big bang” rollout. The Home Office needs to secure delivery of an ESN solution as early as it reasonably can, both to avoid high ongoing costs of the Airwave service which ESN will replace; and to provide end users with more modern and advanced functionality. The Home Office considers this variation represents the best option for securing delivery as early as possible.
This is a modification of a contract via a new procurement procedure pursuant to paragraph 5 of Article 72 of Directive 22014/24/EU.
The new procurement procedure is the negotiated procedure without prior publication, under Article 32, which is justified because the services being procured under the modified contract can be provided only by Motorola because competition is absent for technical reasons.
The services required by the Home Office consist of the full rollout of the ESN solution as soon as reasonably possible (to transition away from, and avoid the high costs of, Airwave and to improve end users' PSCS). The soonest that a full rollout could reasonably be achieved is by around December 2022. The home office is therefore procuring services which include the development and full rollout of an ESN solution by around December 2022 (along with a necessary contractual period thereafter, to facilitate transition to a new provider). Only Motorola can provide such services within that timeframe. This absence of competition is for technical reasons: Motorola has made substantial progress in the development of a technical solution, and any alternative provider would require time to “catch up”; a change to a new provider would require the migration of technical infrastructure from Motorola to the new provider, causing further delay; the technical interface between Airwave and ESN is owned by Motorola (and Airwave-ESN interworking will be required to facilitate the transition from ESN to Airwave, and to avoid users having to carry both Airwave and ESN devices, and/or have unsatisfactory “work-arounds” in their control rooms); and the Home Office may be unable to sub-license essential software to a new provider.
There is no reasonable alternative to procuring these services from Motorola: the home office’s assessment is that, were it to use a different provider for all of these services, full rollout would be delayed by approximately 5 years (including the time needed to procure a new provider). Such delay would (principally because of Airwave’s high cost) cost the home office approximately 2 6000 000 000 GBP (full termination). Alternatively, were the home office to continue to use Motorola’s Kodiak solution but switch to a new provider for the Lot 2 “service wrap” around that solution, then it estimates that this would cause a delay of just over 2 years, at a cost of approximately 1 100 000 000 GBP (partial termination). These figures take account the fact that switching to a new provider would be likely to mean that the home office has not only to pay the new provider for the services, but also covers likely additional legal costs and contractual disputes.
The services include various specialist technical activities such as billing systems and cyber and digital resilience services. Motorola have declared their intention to sub-let some of these elements to relevant specialists. It is anticipated that these sub-contracted services account for in the region of 20 % of the total contract value.


Winner: Motorola Solutions UK Ltd
Award value: 297000000