London Boroughs join forces in mighty £1bn IT procurement framework

This enormous purchasing juggernaut will devour us all

A collective of London borough councils are pulling together their purchasing power in a mega IT products and services framework worth up to £1.1bn over four years.

An invitation to tender was sent to prospective suppliers late last week covering three lots - distributed computing, service desk and data centre services.

Westminster City Council is the contracting authority setting up the framework on behalf of itself and 32 other local councils, with the plan to have services operational by November next year.

The tender document stated that WCC and other boroughs currently use a variety of service providers to cover different parts of IT services - some outsourced, some run in-house, others mixed.

As such the requirements may differ - some will issue call offs for each lot and some may not, and not all of the services included in each lot will be required by each council.

"This means that service providers will have to be flexible in that which they offer to the council and other participating authorities," the tender stated.

The aim is to name one supplier per lot but the rules do not preclude only one supplier being successful across all three lots. Each contracted supplier can front up a consortia.

The supplier or consortium must pass a revenue threshold - it must have a three year average turnover which is equal to or exceeds three times the estimated minimum contract value for a lot.

Distributed computing has a minimum annual value of £1.5m, service desk is £600,000 a year and data centre services minimum is £1m.

The spend with suppliers could rise to £1bn over the multi-year period, the tender stated, but there is no guarantee of this. ®