Tender trouble - £10 billion in contracts under scrutiny

Is the Greater London Authority (GLA) Group spending taxpayer money effectively?

The organisation spends around £10 billion on its procurement activities every year. Transport for London (TfL) provides a procurement service arrangement for the whole of the GLA Group.

The GLA Oversight Committee has investigated GLA procurement practices, focusing particularly on: Silvertown Tunnel, the Garden Bridge, Bond Street Crossrail station, Royal Albert Docks, Silvertown Quays and East Bank.

There are a number of contracts whose value for money has been called into question.

Today the Committee has published a report which considers the current procurement processes in place for the GLA Group, with regard to the selection process of providers, value for money and broader issues of accountability, auditing, and transparency. The recommendations include:

• TfL should formally review the procurement and delivery of Bond Street Crossrail station and the impacts on the delivery of the railway, to ensure the lessons are learned for future major projects.
• On Silvertown Tunnel, TfL needs to ensure that its whole evaluation process is robust and transparent to prevent any future legal challenges.
• When there are a small number of bids for a project, TfL should use an independent expert to estimate the costs for the delivery of the project, to ensure value for money.
• The Mayor should review the lack of success of the Royal Albert Docks development to date and his ambitions, to ensure they remain realistic and deliverable.
• The Mayor should ensure that demonstrable progress is made on the Silvertown Quays development during 2022.

Former Chair of the GLA Oversight Committee, Caroline Pidgeon AM, said:

“£10 billion pounds is a huge amount of money, and it must be spent responsibly.

“Over the years, the London Assembly has reviewed a number of large procurement processes. This investigation continued in that vein and explored a number of procurements that have given this Committee reason to be concerned.

“It’s claimed that the GLA Group’s vast buying power should help create a fairer, greener and more equitable city - but we discovered that procurement arrangements were not being followed in all cases. This led to a significant amount of single-source tender arrangements, which may not have provided value for money.

“The scale of the expenditure makes this an area that is vital to get right, in order to deliver value for money for Londoners.

“Our report makes recommendations to TfL, the Mayor and the LLDC and these must be followed up, to ensure mistakes do not continue to be made.”