Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-03-02
Buyer: Health and Social Care Information Centre, known as NHS Digital
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 72000000
Estimated value: 51000000 GBP
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
Contract with Deloitte LLP for the provision of digital solution design, build and live service of a digital platform, ordering portals and mobile applications to support the Covid-19 National Test Service. The services provided under this contract support the digital and data journey for Covid-19 testing, currently amounting to millions of tests each week, and have introduced new capabilities as the testing programme has evolved to support the pandemic response.
The services will be delivered remotely by the supplier however the supplier will comply with reasonable requests to co-locate where practical to facilitate integration of the services.
Please see the description provided at section II.1.4). The estimated contract value is GBP 51 000 000.
The contract has an initial period expiring on 31 March 2021 and includes an option to extend the contract by way of variation.
The changing pressures of the pandemic due to the new variants in circulation and the increased rate of spread of the virus are both factors contributing to the criticality of ensuring that the testing services continue uninterrupted. Therefore, it is envisaged that the option to extend the contract is likely to be utilised to ensure there is no interruption to service, as this poses a significant risk to public health.
Following signature of the original contract, a contract variation was entered into on 12 February 2021 in order to reflect an increase in the scope of services being provided. Pursuant to this contract variation, the maximum contract value was increased to GBP 51 000 000.
Due to the character limit, further information in relation to section II.2.5) is set out in section VI.3).
1) The Covid-19 outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern as declared by the World Health Organisation on 30 January 2020. The UK Government’s response to the national emergency posed by Covid-19 included putting in place arrangements for large-scale testing for Covid-19 on an urgent basis.
2) Upon transition of responsibility of the Digital Delivery Lead role, NHS Digital awarded the contract to the supplier following the supplier’s prior engagement with DHSC.
3) NHS Digital is satisfied the tests permitting use of the negotiated procedure without prior publication (Regulation 32(2)(b(ii)) are met:
A. The works, supplies or services can be supplied only by a particular economic operator as competition is absent for technical reasons: due to the highly bespoke nature of the testing services and the criticality of ensuring that the testing services continued uninterrupted, at the stage of contract award, the supplier was the only economic operator capable of facilitating the continuation of the testing services. It would be seriously counter-productive to the national effort to have carried out a procurement in respect of some or all of the workstreams being undertaken by the existing provider and/or that any attempt to potentially transition between providers in the context of ensuring that the relevant work progresses with appropriate rapidity could have led to material avoidable delay or risk of disruption to the service and the ability to access data which could have had a fundamental impact on the provision of testing services to citizens in England.
B. No reasonable alternative or substitute exists – the continuation of the testing services was and is critical to England’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak and the containment of the spread of the virus. If the existing supplier was unable to continue in the short-term to provide the services due to the transition of responsibility to another provider identified by NHS Digital, this could have had a catastrophic impact on the success of the TTCE strategy and may have resulted in further spreading of the virus due to difficulties in testing and isolating those who have tested positive.
C. The absence of competition is not the result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement – this procurement is part of a procurement strategy by the UK government to provide a stable and effective digital testing platform to meet demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The threat monitoring and individual based testing surge team services are provided by subcontractors to the Supplier. These subcontracts represent approximately 2.56 % of the contract value. Due to the character limit in this section, please see VI.3 for further information.


Winner: Deloitte LLP
Award value: 51000000
Number of bids: 1