The grounds maintenance contract

In 2016 ARK Consultancy were given the task to procure new regional contracts on behalf of Accent Housing. These contracts covered all major service provision for the entire housing stock managed by the Housing Association.

In common with all the other contracts this was for an initial five year period, which could be extended to ten.

Accent Housing divide their housing stock into five regional areas. Each contractor could bid for all five areas but could only win two. This is where the problems start.

There were very few contractors involved in the bidding process and the same contractors bid for all five lots.

The type of tender used is known as a restricted procedure and is governed by specific rules most notably;

The Public Contracts Regulations 2015

 

Malc Firth winning tender

This pattern repeated itself across all the grounds contracts

Greenfingers in winning the Yorks/Humber contract came in £3,800,000 less than that figure estimated by Accent Housing.

HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?

Greenfingers winning tender

 

 

Collusion amongst bidders distorts true competition and reduces public confidence in the procurement process achieving value for money.

Procurement fraud is the unlawful manipulation of a procurement process to acquire contracts, good or services or to obtain an unfair advantage during the procurement process.

COVER BIDDING

'The essence of the procurement process is that Accent shall receive bona fide competitive tenders.'

All contractors involved in the procurement process signed a certificate of non collusive tendering (tender form 3). In essence this means all bids are kept secret.

How was it that Malc Firth in the three lots they failed to win increased their bids exactly 72% above each winning bid when those bids have to be kept secret?

Estimates provided by Accent did not reflect the final pricing put forward by contractors and so could not be used as a guide.

It would appear the three unfavourable regions simply had their bids increased to an 'unrealistic' figure. As the weighting system operated by ARK placed 50% emphasis on pricing it would automatically rule out any chance of winning those regions.

The only conclusion I believe answers this problem is that Malc Firth would have had to have been aware of the other contractors bids to do this!

A simple solution to resolve this problem would be to compare the Greenfingers bids submitted in order to see if there is repeated practice occurring.

ACCENT HOUSING HAVE CONSISTENTLY REFUSED TO PROVIDE THAT INFORMATION.

There were so many obvious issues with the procurement process it is disturbing that no one involved picked up on it.

The chart below demonstrates how the bids across all five regions were distributed.

What is concerning is how much lower bids were than the expected price Accent had predicted. Are works being undertaken on 'the cheap'?. That would explain the huge number of complaints.

The chart also shows how the bids by Malc Firth (in grey) compare to the 'winning bids'.

I believe anyone with the slightest understanding of the procurement processes would immediately identify serious issues with these figures.

Real costs of ground maintenance

If you believe, as a resident, you are being overcharged for grounds maintenance or the service is not of a reasonable standard you will find it extremely difficult to put forward a challenge.

Accent Housing offer in their defence that the entire grounds maintenance contract is based upon an 'output model' despite the schedule of works that underpin the grounds contracts.

What is really insidious about this argument is that it precludes Accent Housing from having to provide any information on the hours worked on each site or the actual work involved.

This hides the genuine cost of work as dictated by the lease for work connected to the estate.

In a copy of an email from another estate Sarah Ireland states that the output based model (used as a defence during the tribunal process by Accent) is only applied in Yorkshire and only on mixed tenure sites.

Lambert Court is not a mixed tenure site.

Extract from email.

Accent Housing would not provide the hours worked on site at Lambert Court in order to present to the tribunal.

Those attendance sheets promised by Sarah Ireland were never provided.

Another attempt to pacify residents?

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