Case studies archive

Case study 18 - Highways Maintenance Contract

Background

Transport for London’s (TfL’s) Highways Maintenance contract was awarded in April 2007. Surface Transport led the procurement activity and along with TfL’s equality team were instrumental in pioneering an innovative approach to responsible procurement, including consideration of equalities and diversity issues. This contract awarded to three contractors Accord, Amey and Ringway is now showing significant responsible procurement benefits and has also influenced the way equalities and diversity issues are addressed across the industry.

Amey’s Managing Director for Local Government, Nick Sharman said:

“The TfL North Area contract really focused our minds on delivering a sustainable service, minimising the impact of works on the local environment and engaging with the local community. As a result we now go beyond the requirements of the original contract and are undertaking a range of environmental and community initiatives. We are also encouraging and supporting our supply chain to do the same."

Activity

As part of the tender process each supplier was asked to submit an equality and diversity action plan, which contained plans on 4 key issues including;

• Equality Policy outlining equality objectives and how these will be achieved over the duration of the Contract and how they will be implemented by Subcontractors.
• A Diversity Training Plan outlining how Employees and Contractors would be trained in diversity issues relating to the delivery of the Contract.
• A Supplier Diversity Plan outlining the bidders prospects for optimising the participation of diverse suppliers, including details of how this will be encourages and measured.
• A Communication Plan outlining the approach to managing external relations and communications with the local communities and relevant stakeholders who were directly affected by the contract.

To ensure the best possible outcome from the process and to develop good relationships TfL worked closely with the suppliers to provide relevant support and guidance. This took the form of initial briefing, submission of draft plan, which was followed by feedback, and then final submission of plans. The plans were required to be SMART and the evaluation focused on actions that would achieve measurable outcomes.

Learning was taken from this process and the successful contractors are now working to a specified framework. This framework requires suppliers to identify the following:

• Equality & Diversity (E&D) objectives for each aspect of the plan;
• Their baseline/current position in relation to the objective;
• Actions to be taken to secure achievement of objective;
• Timeframe for the action to be taken;
• Person responsible for the action;
• Resource required to support the action being progressed; and
• The measures of success.

Since the contract was let in 2007 there has been some significant achievements including;

• Contractors now have E&D monitoring systems in place;
• Contractors now understand their baseline position;
• Contractors now understand the relevance of targets are now setting appropriate targets;
• Contractors are investing in additional resources to ensure that they are able to deliver to the E&D agenda;
• Contractors are champions of the E&D agenda with other authorities and to the rest of the industry;
• Contractors are running and attending meet the buyer events targeting SME suppliers;
• Contractors are pro-actively approaching TfL for support and assistance to develop their approaches to E&D.

For example, one of the contractors Accord have as a result of the emphaisis of E&D consideration in the contract have appointed a full time Equality and Diversity Officer who is responsible for their policy, core values, collecting monitoring information, training and recruitment from the local community.

In addition, all three contractors Accord, Amey and Ringway along with others in the industry have set up an E&D forum to share experiences of E&D practices and to constantly challenge each other to improve their E&D practices. This has been as a direct result of TfL’s innovative approach to responsible procurement.